The Times of London, November 2004

On 12 November 2004, The Times of London ran a puzzle in its features section that almost nobody noticed. By Christmas, the same puzzle was being asked for by name at newsstands. By the following March, it was in every British paper that mattered. Two years later, it had appeared in over six hundred newspapers worldwide.

The puzzle was sudoku. That single Times appearance is the cleanest date for the moment a Japanese magazine curiosity became a global habit.

How it got there

The bridge between Japan and Britain was a New Zealand-born retired judge named Wayne Gould. He had spotted sudoku in a Tokyo bookshop in 1997, become fascinated, and over six years wrote a computer program that could generate puzzles of varying difficulty on demand. By 2004 he was carrying his software on a laptop and pitching it to newspapers around the world.

He did not sell the puzzles for cash. He gave them to The Times for free in exchange for credit at the foot of the puzzle, which pointed readers to his website. The arrangement looked modest. It turned out to be one of the most lucrative pieces of accidental marketing in publishing history.

The chain reaction

Within three weeks, the Daily Mail had its own sudoku. The Daily Telegraph followed in January 2005, the Guardian in February, the Independent shortly after. By April 2005, sudoku was running in every UK national daily simultaneously, and editors were openly talking about it as the biggest puzzle event since the crossword.

America was slower. The New York Post added sudoku in April 2005, and the New York Times resisted for several months before capitulating. Once the Times moved, the rest of American newspapering followed within weeks.

"Reader response to the new puzzle has exceeded anything the desk can remember from a single feature launch."

Why it caught on then, and not in 1979

Sudoku was invented in Indianapolis in 1979 by Howard Garns, who called it "Number Place". It ran in Dell Pencil Puzzles & Word Games for years and never broke out. The same puzzle, with a Japanese name and a smaller distribution, sat patiently in Nikoli magazines through the 1980s and 1990s. Nothing happened.

2004 was different for two reasons. One: the world had a generation of newspaper readers looking for something to replace the crossword once they had outgrown it. Two: Wayne Gould's software meant newspapers could print fresh puzzles every day without paying a constructor. Sudoku scaled in a way no other newspaper feature could.

What that single page changed

Bookshops report a sudden category called "puzzle books" that barely existed in 2004 and dominated stationery sections by 2006. Pencil sales rose. Crossword editors received complaints from older readers about being asked to choose between the two. Eyesight optometrists made a small fortune off newspaper-print sudoku in magnifying lamp shops. The cultural footprint of one twenty-five clue grid was enormous.

The grid is the same grid

The puzzle that ran in The Times in November 2004 is, structurally, the same puzzle you can play on Sudokly today. Nine rows, nine columns, nine boxes, digits one through nine. The grid was old when it landed on that page and it has not changed since. What changed was that two and a half billion newspaper readers found out about it within a single year.

If you want to play one in the spirit of that November Tuesday, try a medium puzzle, which is about the difficulty of the first Times grid. Or read more about the program that started it all in the Wayne Gould profile.