The Sudoku Craze

The puzzle's secret history is stranger than the craze. The modern sudoku was most likely designed by Howard Garns, a 74-year-old retired architect and freelance puzzle constructor, and first published by Dell Magazines in 1979 under the name "Number Place" — anonymously. It might have stayed a filler curiosity forever, but in April 1984 Maki Kaji, president of the Japanese puzzle publisher Nikoli, brought it to Japan as "Sūji wa dokushin ni kagiru" — "the digits must be single" — later shortened to Sudoku, a name Nikoli registered as a trademark in Japan. For two decades the puzzle thrived there while the rest of the world had no idea.

Then a retired Hong Kong judge named Wayne Gould spotted a partly finished puzzle in a Japanese bookshop in 1997 and spent six years writing a computer program that could generate puzzles rapidly — then started handing them to newspapers. The first paper outside Japan to run one was the Conway Daily Sun of New Hampshire, in September 2004. When The Times of London launched it on November 12, 2004 (as "Su Doku"), the fuse caught: the first reader letter arrived the very next day, and the British obsession detonated into a global one.

2005 was the pinnacle year, when sudoku colonized the culture: papers worldwide added daily grids, sudoku books swallowed bestseller lists, and on July 1, 2005 Sky One aired Sudoku Live — the world's first live sudoku TV show, presented by Carol Vorderman, with nine teams of nine players. The World Sudoku Championship followed in 2006 under the World Puzzle Federation, and it's still being contested today. What faded wasn't the puzzle but the paper: the craze was the last great analog puzzle mania, all pencils and newsprint and dog-eared airport paperbacks, and every puzzle app since — sudoku's own included — lives in the shadow of the years when a number grid was the most contagious thing in print.