The History Of Sudoku
by Danny Demeersseman
Originally called Number Place, the first puzzle was created by Howard Garnes, a freelance puzzle constructor, in 1979.
The puzzle was first published in New York in the late 1970s by the specialist puzzle publisher Dell Magazines in its magazine Dell Pencil Puzzles and Word Games, under the title Number Place.
The puzzle was introduced in Japan by Nikoli in the paper Monthly Nikolist in April 1984 as “Suji wa dokushin ni kagiru”, which can be translated as “the numbers must be single”. At a later date, the name was abbreviated to Sudoku (pronounced sue-do-koo; su = number, doku = single).
In 1986, Nikoli introduced two innovations: the number of givens was restricted to no more than 30 and puzzles became “symmetrical” (meaning the givens were distributed in rotationally symmetric cells). Within Japan, Nikoli still holds the trademark for the name Sudoku; other publications in Japan use alternative names.
In 1989, Loadstar/Softdisk Publishing published DigitHunt on the Commodore 64, which was apparently the first home computer version of Sudoku. At least one publisher still uses that title.