‘Godfather of Sudoku’ made numbers game global craze
Maki Kaji, a university dropout who turned a numbers game into one of the world’s most popular logic puzzles and became known as the “Godfather of Sudoku,” died Aug. 10 at his home in Tokyo. He was 69.
His death was announced Tuesday by Nikoli, the puzzle company he co-founded. The company said in a statement that the cause was bile duct cancer.
In a 2008 speech, Kaji said he first “fell in love” with a game called Number Place in 1984. He renamed it sudoku.
“I wanted to create a Japanese name,” he said. “I created the name in about 25 seconds.”
The reason: He had been in a rush to get to a horse race. He said he hadn’t expected the name to stick. (“Sudoku” roughly translates to “single numbers.”)
By then, with two childhood friends, he had started the company that would become Nikoli, which says it’s among the most prolific global publishers of puzzle magazines and books. Nikoli helped catapult sudoku into the mainstream in the mid-2000s, publishing what it said was Japan’s first puzzle magazine.
An American is believed to have invented an earlier version of sudoku. But the game’s true origins are murky. Some trace it back to Leonhard Euler, an 18th-century Swiss mathematician. Others say the idea came from China, through India, to the Arab world in the eighth or ninth century.
However the puzzle was created, Kaji’s company made sudoku and other similar puzzles globally popular. Nikoli’s secret, he said in 2007, was that it largely tested and perfected existing puzzles.
“I want to make Nikoli into the world’s source for puzzle games,” he said. “We have a lot more puzzles where sudoku came from.”
In the late 1990s, when he pitched the sudoku puzzle to publishers in New York and London, he was unsuccessful, he said. But within a decade, the puzzle was being published across hundreds of newspapers globally, generating millions of dollars.
According to Nikoli, an estimated 200 million people in 100 countries have solved the puzzle, which involves filling in a numbered grid. A world championship is held each year.
The company said that in 2017, an older man living in temporary housing in Otsuchi, Japan, after the devastating 2011 earthquake wrote Kaji to inform him his puzzles were too difficult. That inspired Kaji to create more accessible puzzles for children and older people. Kaji was born Oct. 8, 1951, in Sapporo, Japan. According to a book he wrote on the sudoku world craze, his father was an engineer at a telecom company and his mother worked at a kimono shop. He graduated from Shakujii High School in Tokyo but dropped out of Keio University.
He’s survived by his wife, Naomi, and two daughters.
Puzzle experts praised Kaji for having imbued their world with soul.
“His most important contribution to the world of logic puzzles is subtle and underappreciated,” Nick Baxter, the captain of the U.S. team that competes in the World Sudoku Championship, wrote in an email.
In an age where most sudoku and similar puzzles are computer generated, Baxter said, Nikoli continued to make puzzles generated by humans.
Kaji said in 2007 that the secret to inventing a good puzzle was to make the rules “simple and easy for everyone, including beginners.”
He stepped down as head of his company in July because of ill health.