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'Godfather of Sudoku' hooked the world on logic puzzles

The New York Times
August 17, 2021 at 9:28PM
573511495
Maki Kaji, in a 2007 portrait at a racecourse in Japan, died at age 69. The company he co-founded popularized puzzle books. (Ko Sasaki • New York Times/The Minnesota Star Tribune)

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 speech in 2008, 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 had not expected the name to stick. ("Sudoku" roughly translates to "single numbers.")

By then, with two childhood friends, he had started the company that would later become Nikoli, which says it is 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.

The company itself does not create many new puzzles — for example, 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 told the New York Times in 2007, was that it largely tested and perfected existing puzzles.

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"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.

In 2017, the company said, an older man living in temporary housing in Otsuchi, a town in northern Japan, after the devastating 2011 earthquake, wrote Kaji to inform him that 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. He graduated from Shakujii High School in Tokyo but dropped out of Keio University.

He is survived by his wife, Naomi, and two daughters.

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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," said Nick Baxter, the captain of the U.S. team that competes in the World Sudoku Championship. In an age where most sudoku and similar puzzles are computer generated, Baxter said, Nikoli continued to make puzzles generated by humans.

Despite the millions pulled in by sudoku, Kaji said in the 2007 interview with the Times that he had received only a small fraction of the money, in part because he had been late to trademarking the puzzle.

But, he said, he had no regrets.

"We're prolific because we do it for the love of games," Kaji said, "not for the money."

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LIVIA Albeck-Ripka

Hisako Ueno

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