Maki Kaji created a game with an estimated world market of nearly $2 billion that is played by tens of millions of people around the world
Maki Kaji spotted a number puzzle in an American magazine one day in 1984 when he was on the way home from a horse-racing track in his native Japan. He refined the puzzle, gave it a Japanese name later abbreviated to sudoku and featured it in the puzzle magazine he had started with friends.
Mr. Kaji, who died at age 69 of bile duct cancer on Aug. 10 at his home in Tokyo, never bothered to trademark the word outside Japan. In 2004, after a fan from New Zealand got a sudoku published in the Times of London, a global craze was born.not to take out their pencils for number games during takeoff and landing.
Nikoli Co., the publishing firm Mr. Kaji co-founded, brings in nearly $3 million in annual revenue publishing its own puzzle books and supplying other publishers. That is a tiny fraction of the global sudoku market, which Nikoli estimates at nearly $2 billion. It says more than 200 million people around the world play sudoku.
In sudoku, players fill in squares set in a nine-by-nine grid—subdivided into nine boxes—so that the numbers one through nine appear precisely once in each row, column and box.
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