The History of Sudoku
The Creation of Sudoku
While the name Sudoku is Japanese, the modern version of the logic-driven number game actually originated in the United States. Howard Garnes, a seventy-four-year-old retired architect and freelance puzzle constructor, added the nine 3x3 subgroups to a standard 9x9 Latin Square. He submitted the first known Sudoku puzzle to Dell Magazines, a specialist puzzle publisher, in New York for publication. Not yet labeled as Sudoku, however, the game debuted in Dell Pencil Puzzles and Word Games as “Number Place.”
Going Global
Five years after its creation, the puzzle drifted across the Pacific Ocean to Japan, where Nikoli, Japan’s leading puzzle company, picked it up and published it as Suuji Wa Dokushin Ni Kagiru, which means “the numbers must be single,” or “the numbers must occur only once.”
The name "Sudoku" stuck
The Japanese puzzle fans loved the game. The president of Nikoli realized that the game’s success was hindered only by its long, unwieldy name, and shortened the title to Sudoku, or “single digit.” Nikoli also reduced the amount of given clues, and made those given appear symmetrically in the grid. Sudoku’s popularity grew, and today, Japan alone publishes over 600,000 copies of Sudoku magazines every month.
Sudoku Arrives in Europe
At the end of 2004, the London Times, the leading British newspaper, published its first Sudoku puzzle at the behest of Wayne Gould, a retired Hong Kong judge, computer programmer, and puzzle fan. Gould had created a computer program to generate Sudoku puzzles, and provided it to the Times at no charge. A Sudoku craze ensued. Another paper, The Daily Mail, began featuring Sudoku just three days later. Within just six months, newspapers across the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and Australia all started to carry Sudoku.
Sudoku Comes Home
Sudoku made its homecoming in April of 2005 when the New York Post published the puzzle as a regular feature. In mid-July, the Sudoku mania spread from sea to shining sea when USA Today and The Daily News both launched their Sudoku columns on the same day. Since then, Sudoku has steadily replaced traditional bridge columns and weary crossword puzzles in papers across the nation and around the globe.
