In 1982, the Japanese publisher Maki Kaji was flicking through an American puzzle magazine when he came across a puzzle called Number Place. He spoke no English and it was the only puzzle in the magazine that he understood. He thought it would go down well with the readers of his own puzzle magazine, Nikoli (named after one of the runners in the 1980 Epsom derby – Kaji liked nothing better than a flutter on the horses).
He renamed it sudoku – an abbreviation of a Japanese punning phrase: 'Numbers should be single, unmarried.' He also tweaked the presentation, making the given digits in the grid appear in a symmetrical pattern, like the patterns in crossword grids. He created his first sudoku for Nikoli in 1984, and it became a regular feature. But it was never the most popular puzzle in the magazine.
Sudoku attracted barely any interest beyond Nikoli's niche Japanese readership until 1997, when Wayne Gould, a New Zealander on holiday in Tokyo, discovered it in a bookstore. Gould designed a program that generated examples, and in 2004 he sold the idea to The Times in London. The Times began publishing a regular sudoku, and within weeks almost every newspaper in the UK had followed suit. The fad spread rapidly to other countries, and by the end of the decade Maki estimated that the number of regular sudoku players exceeded 100 million people.
Gould could not satisfy the global demand for the puzzle, and many newspapers and publishers came to Maki for his vast archive of examples. Maki sold sudoku in dozens of countries, and became the international figurehead for the craze. He even changed the job description on his business card to 'Godfather of Sudoku'.
Maki had trademarked sudoku in Japan, but when interest exploded globally it was already too late to trademark it anywhere else. He ultimately earned a tiny fraction of global sudoku revenues. He died of cancer in 2021, aged 69; this article is an edited extract from his obituary in The Grauniad.
© Haydn Thompson 2021