Sudoku looks Japanese. The name is Japanese, the visual structure recalls an Eastern puzzle, the popularity exploded first in Tokyo magazines in the 1980s. But the game is older than that, and more European than that, and the full story crosses three continents in nearly 130 years. Worth knowing.
The first documented appearance of something very close to modern Sudoku was in 1895, in the French newspaper Le Siècle. It appeared as problem number 36 of the weekly recreational math feature. It was a nine-by-nine grid with numbers and the basic rule of not repeating any number per row or column. Only one layer was missing (the three-by-three blocks) to be the Sudoku we know today. The competing newspaper La France added exactly that layer a few years later. The game then disappeared for decades, with no proper name, no coverage, no audience.
In 1979, eighty-four years later, a retired American architect named Howard Garns reinvented the game. Garns worked as a freelancer for Dell Magazines, and proposed a number puzzle on a 9x9 grid with a structure almost identical to Le Siècle’s. Garns named the game Number Place. It came out in a Dell magazine, with no fanfare. Garns died in 1989 not knowing he had created what would become the most popular logic game of the 21st century.
It was Japan that picked up Number Place and turned it into a phenomenon. In 1984, the publisher Nikoli published the puzzle in one of its puzzle magazines, with some structural modifications that would increase the elegance of the puzzles (in particular, a fixed number of starting clues and visual symmetry in their placement). The Nikoli editor, Maki Kaji, gave the game its Japanese name: sūji wa dokushin ni kagiru, which can be translated as the numbers must be single. Later shortened to Sudoku. Maki Kaji died in 2021, known as the father of Sudoku.
Sudoku became a fad in Japan in the 80s and 90s, but remained a niche product outside the country. The turning point came in 2004. Wayne Gould, a retired New Zealand judge, discovered Sudoku in a Tokyo bookstore and became obsessed. He went back to New Zealand, wrote a computer program to generate puzzles automatically, and offered the game to The Times of London. The Times published its first Sudoku on November 12, 2004. In less than six months, the game had entered more than 100 newspapers around the world. In 2005, The New York Times also started publishing it.
The timing of the viralization explains part of the impact. In 2004, smartphones were still toys for the elite. The iPhone would not appear until 2007. Broadband internet was not yet universal. People had newspaper time, and Sudoku fit that format perfectly. The first generation of Sudoku players in the world learned the game on a printed page, with pencil and eraser. It was a breakfast pastime, a bank-line pastime, a phoneless airport waiting room pastime.
When the iPhone arrived in 2007, and the App Store in 2008, Sudoku migrated to digital easily. It was one of the first types of game to appear on the iPhone, and never left. Today there is a huge ecosystem of Sudoku apps, some good, several bad, all competing for the same player who learned the game in Le Siècle, in Number Place, in Nikoli or in The Times, three generations ago.
Sudoku BLA enters this story as the first Brazilian app conceived for that tradition. No ads, no login, no embedded social network. It works offline, the way the newspaper did. It has editorial typography, the way the newspaper had. It is made in Goiânia, far from Le Siècle and Nikoli and The Times, but within the same editorial lineage. You can download it on the App Store. And when you play, think for a moment about Maki Kaji, Howard Garns, Wayne Gould, and the anonymous editors of the French newspaper of 1895.
