Sokoban - WikiHQ

is a puzzle video game created in 1981 by Hiroyuki Imabayashi. In Sokoban, the player pushes boxes in a warehouse to get them onto storage locations. The game is viewed from a top-down perspective. Boxes can only be pushed, never pulled, and only one box can be pushed at a time. The principal challenge is planning moves correctly to avoid causing a deadlock, a situation where a box or the player becomes permanently trapped, making the puzzle unsolvable.

Imabayashi's company, Thinking Rabbit, released the first commercial version in Japan in 1982. Following that debut, Thinking Rabbit and its licensed partners developed a series of new titles until 2000. The game debuted internationally in 1988 with the U.S. release Soko-Ban. Falcon, a Japanese software company, acquired the Sokoban rights in 2001. Since then, new installments have been published either by Falcon under the Thinking Rabbit brand or by licensed partners.

Over its history, the Sokoban series has sold over 4.1 million copies worldwide, with more than 40 official games released across various platforms. Reviewers have highlighted the game's simplicity, its addictive and challenging nature, and the depth of thought required.

Sokoban's core mechanics have been replicated in numerous clones, and the game has inspired thousands of community-created levels. The Sokoban puzzle concept of pushing boxes to clear a path or move them to targets has also appeared in other video games. Furthermore, Sokoban has been studied in the fields of computational complexity and artificial intelligence.

Gameplay

left|thumb|The puzzles in Sokoban require the player to push boxes to designated spots (shown as red dots in the animation) in the game world.

Sokoban takes place in a warehouse viewed from above and composed of walls and floor squares. A floor square may be empty, occupied by the player, or occupied by a box. Some floor squares are storage locations. The number of storage locations equals the number of boxes. The objective of the puzzle is to push all boxes onto storage locations. Boxes and walls block the player's movement, but the player can walk up to a box and push it to an empty square directly beyond it. If a box is pushed against a wall or another box, it does not move. Pulling boxes is not possible.

Sokoban requires players to plan several moves ahead and consider all possible outcomes. or permanently prevent access to boxes that still need to be moved. He had long been intrigued by the movement of a character pushing luggage in which luggage was used as an obstacle to block radiation; he implemented that movement as a puzzle using BASIC in spring, In autumn, he completed the design of levels that proved challenging even for his friends. while other sources give 1983 as the release year, with differing months: April, In 1984, Thinking Rabbit released Sokoban 2, which included fifty new levels and a puzzle editor. Throughout the 1980s, new titles appeared on various Japanese platforms, including home computers such as the MSX and PC-9801, and consoles like the Famicom, Sega SG-1000, Sega Mega Drive, and Game Boy. These releases were developed either by Thinking Rabbit or by other companies under license agreements. Falcon, a Japanese software company, trademarked the game's kanji name "" in 1988. New titles in the official series were released in Japan throughout the 1990s for platforms including the Super Famicom, Windows, Macintosh, and PlayStation. and trademarked the Latin-script name "Sokoban" in 2003 and the name "Thinking Rabbit" in 2011. From 2004 to 2007, Falcon developed several titles for Japanese mobile phones. Between 2015 and 2018, Falcon developed five Sokoban titles for Windows and the smartphone game Sokoban Touch (2016), publishing each under the Thinking Rabbit brand. Notably, Falcon bundled four of these Windows titles into the (2016) to commemorate the series' 35th anniversary, which was published by . Unbalance developed and published an official title in 2021, The Sokoban, for the Nintendo Switch and PlayStation 4.

Games

Sokoban has a fixed set of gameplay rules; Conversely, is an action-puzzle game that deviates from the warehouse keeper mechanic; the player shoots orbs and fills holes with boulders.

More than 20 official Sokoban titles have been released across over 30 platforms. NEC PC-6001mkII NEC PC-8001mkII Fujitsu FM-7 Sharp MZ-2000 Sharp X1

|Thinking Rabbit

| rowspan="2" |ASCII

| rowspan="2" |Japan

| (Tape pack)

|1984

|MSX

|Seiji Nishikawa

|1985

|Game Pocket Computer

|Epoch

|Japan

|1985

|SG-1000

|Sega

|Japan

|1986

|Famicom Disk System

|ASCII

|Japan

|Soko-Ban

|1988

|IBM PC Commodore 64 Apple II

|Spectrum HoloByte

|North America, Europe

| rowspan="6" |

| rowspan="6" |1989

|NEC PC-9801

|Thinking Rabbit

| rowspan="5" |Thinking Rabbit

| rowspan="6" |Japan

|NEC PC-8801

|Thinking Rabbit

|Sharp X68000

|Thinking Rabbit

|Sharp X1

|Thinking Rabbit

|FM Towns

|Thinking Rabbit

|MSX2

|Micro Cabin

| rowspan="3" | BoxxleNA,EU

|1989

| rowspan="3" |Pony CanyonJP FCINA

|1991EU

| rowspan="2" |JP DreamWorksNA

| rowspan="2" | BoxyboyNA

| rowspan="2" |Media RingsJP NECNA

| rowspan="2" | Boxxle IINA

|1990

| rowspan="2" |Game Boy

| rowspan="2" |Atelier Double

| rowspan="2" |Pony CanyonJP FCI AmericaNA

|Namco

|Japan

|1990

|Game Gear

|Riverhill Soft

|Japan

|1991

|NEC PC-9801

|Thinking Rabbit

|Japan

|1993

|Sharp X68000

|Thinking Rabbit

|Sharp

|Pack-In-Video

|Japan

| rowspan="2" | (for Windows/for Macintosh)

|1995

|Windows

|Outback

| rowspan="2" |Itochu

| rowspan="2" |Japan

|1996

|Macintosh

|Outback

| rowspan="2" |

|1996

|PlayStation

|Thinking Rabbit

|Itochu

| rowspan="3" |Itochu

| rowspan="3" |Japan

| rowspan="2" |

|1997

|Windows

|Outback

|1997

|Macintosh

|Outback

|1998

|Windows

|Outback

|Fujitsu Parex

|Japan

|1998

|PlayStation

|Soft Office Thinking Rabbit Three D

|2000

|Windows

|Unbalance

|2004

|EZweb

| rowspan="2" |Falcon

|Konami

|Japan

|2015

|Windows

| rowspan="2" |Falcon

| rowspan="4" |Thinking Rabbit

| rowspan="4" |Japan

|2015

|Windows

|2016

|Windows

|Falcon

|2016

|Windows

|Falcon

|Sokoban Touch

|2016

|Android iOS

|Falcon

|Japan

|2018

|Windows

|Falcon

|Thinking Rabbit

|Japan

|2018

|Digital terrestrial television

| rowspan="3" |Falcon Junji Tanaka wrote that the first level of the PC-8801 version perplexed puzzle enthusiasts upon release. The MSX version alone, published by ASCII, sold over 400,000 copies and was considered a commercial success. The U.S. release, Soko-Ban, sold over 50,000 copies by mid-September 1988. By , after 15 years, total sales, including for PlayStation exceeded 1.4 million units across all platforms, including game consoles, word processors, and electronic organizers. By 2018, Chukyo Television Broadcasting reported that the series had sold over 4.1 million copies worldwide since its 1982 release.

The 1990 book described Sokoban as "the king of PC puzzles", listing Sokoban 1, Sokoban 2, and Sokoban Perfect. It included Sokoban 1 (1983) in its top 10 games of the 1980s, a list selected by 71 industry experts based on titles they considered most memorable rather than personal preference. In 1988, Roy Wagner of Computer Gaming World suggested that anyone trying the US version, Soko-Ban, would likely remain absorbed for an extended period. The Computer Entertainer newsletter described the game as "fascinating" and "almost impossible to stop playing". In its console reviews, Computer and Video Games magazine called Sokoban for Game Boy "an infuriatingly addictive little title" and said its appeal was "not far off" from Tetris. In 1990, recognized Sokoban as a staple puzzle game, citing its difficulty, depth, and continued presence across multiple platforms.

Commentators often highlighted one or more aspects of the game: its simplicity, the depth of thought it required of players, or its challenging nature. Micomgames staff described the first Sokoban title as simple yet requiring deep thought comparable to playing Go or Shogi. Family Computer magazine's All Catalog supplement described Sokoban for Game Boy as great due to the simplicity of its gameplay, and Computer and Video Games magazine staff described it as one of the Game Boy's "simple but effective puzzle games". and in Computer Gaming World, Wagner summarized it as "very playable and mentally challenging". and reviewing Boxxle for Game Boy, he stated that it required careful planning or plenty of trial and error (usually both). He later commented on Boxyboy for the TurboGrafx-16 that while the initial rooms were not difficult, players would eventually encounter one that "seems impossible".

The series faced occasional criticism for a lack of variety. Tom R. Halfhill wrote that the puzzles in Shove It! were "essentially the same", In the decades since, the series has attracted many enthusiasts in Japan and overseas. The game's core mechanics have been replicated in numerous clones across a wide variety of platforms, The Sokoban community has created thousands of levels distinct from the official releases, freely available online and ranging in difficulty.

Puzzles resembling Sokoban, involving pushing boxes or similar obstacles to the correct targets, have been present in gaming, The Legend of Zelda series and titles such as Adventures of Lolo (1989) and LIT (2009) incorporate Sokoban-style elements into their gameplay;

Research

In computational complexity theory, deciding whether any given Sokoban puzzle is solvable is a problem known to be NP-hard and PSPACE-complete. In artificial intelligence research, Sokoban serves as an experimental testbed. and solution lengths significantly longer than in other domains. the branching factor ranges from 0 to 136. Reported solution lengths for this suite range from 97 to 674 pushes. Despite these advances, some puzzles that humans can solve are beyond the reach of state-of-the-art solvers. Humans solve Sokoban puzzles by breaking them down into subproblems,