The History of Sudoku Puzzle Games

The history of Sudoku Puzzle Games is presented in this blog post. Lets start with the origin of this game. When considering the name Sudoku, the first country that comes to our mind is Japan.

But Japan is not the country where Sudoku was first popularized. Before going to Japan, this game was already being played in UK and USA. Nonetheless, the Japanese are the ones who came up with the name Sudoku.

It is funny though how Japanese people came up with the name Sudoku. What they did is they took an example from American magazine titled as "Number Place" and then translated it into unique expression with the following meaning:

• Su means number in Japanese language,


• Doku means single unit in Japanese language.

By doing that, this game immediately became very popular in Japan simply because Japanese people prefer number puzzles to word puzzles. This can be explained because of the Japanese language itself: Crosswords just do not function very well.

When was Sudoku Puzzle first published?

The Sudoku puzzle game was first published back in late 1970. This happened in New York and the publisher was "Dell Magazines". This publisher was previously already known as a specialist for logical and ability based puzzle games. This game was published in Maths Puzzles and Logic Problems magazine under the name "Number Place".

Who actually designed this first Sudoku puzzle game is unknown. Nevertheless, it is possible that one of the Dell's puzzle constructors named Walter Mackey could be the person, who designed it.

It was not until yes 1984 when Sudoku was first published in Japan. It appeared in the monthly magazine Nikolist under the name “Suuji wa dokushin ni kagiru”. To translate this in english: “the numbers must be there in only on instance”.

Later on in year 1986 as Sudoku Puzzles were getting more and more popular, Nikoli introduced two different versions of this game. In new versions no more than 30 "givens" were permitted and the grid became proportionate.

Nowadays, Sudoku is being published in all the main stream magazines all over the world, but the trademark of Sudoku is still owned by the Nikoli. Other magazines and publications in Japan use other names for this puzzles though.

The digitalization of Sudoku puzzle games

Sudoku was soon brought to the computer as well. This happened in year 1989 when a programme called DigitHund was produced for the Commodore 64.

This programme was developed by the company named Loadstar/Softdisk Publising and is basically the home computer version of Sudoku puzzle games. People of all ages were able to enjoy this game in a digital version as well.

As you probably know, today you can find Sudoku puzzles in a wide variety of places, among the most popular are perhaps the New York Post and USA Today. Almost every publication out there at some point published a Sudoku game in it.

You will also find this game under the name "Nine Numbers". While Nikoli was able to cash in big time with Sudoku puzzles, the company who invented americanized version of Sudoku was not able to do that.

The Sudoku puzzle arrived at hysteria condition in Japan in 2004 and this hysteria later on spread to the USA and the UK through various national newspapers. The Daily Telegraph uses the name “Sudoku” but you may find it named as “su doku” in other places.