Sudoko’s Just the Tip of Nikoli’s Puzzle Universe

Maki Kaji is not world famous, but his game sure is. You see, he’s the math wiz behind sudoko, which can be seen every day in more than 600 newspapers and generates more than $250 million a year….but not for him. The NY Times profiled this shy horse-racing fanatic yesterday and revealed that Kaji’s company, Nikoli, grosses just $4 million a year, since they never trademarked the sudoko name and thus don’t reap any huge rewards from its growing popularity. But that’s ok with Kaji.

“In hindsight, though, he now thinks that oversite [not trademarking] was a brilliant mistake. The fact that no one controlled sudoko’s intellectual property rights let the game grow unfettered, he said. They don’t plan to trademark any of the many new games they are developing either. “We’re prolific because we do it for the love of games, not for the money.”

The Times story said that the company has more than 250 more such number puzzles in the works, including games in which lines are connected in snakelike shapes around numbers. Up to ten ideas for new puzzles are supplied each time the quarterly magazine comes out. The original game Kaji gave sudoko means ‘bachelor numbers,’ in Japanese, referring to the use of only single digit numbers. “We have a lot more puzzles where sudoko came from,” he said.