When it comes to popular puzzles, it is hard to beat Sudokuin terms of challenge and satisfaction.

A devilish combination of simple mechanics and complex execution, Sudoku elevated itself from a relatively obscure Japanese number puzzle to a worldwide phenomenon in a way that made it feel like it came out of nowhere.

It is far from the first puzzle to come from Japan, but why did Sudoku endure when alternatives such as Picross were relatively more obscure? As well as this, did it truly come from Japan?

The earliest sudoku-type puzzle was actually published in France in 1895 under the name Diabolical Magic Square, in the daily financial newspaper La France.

Even then, it was an adaptation and refinement of an existing arithmetic-based Sudoku variant first published in 1892 in Le Siecle. Both had largely disappeared by 1914.

The original inventor of Sudoku is believed to be American architect Howard Gains, but his contributions to what he called “Number Place” were only known decades after he passed away in 1989.

His games were first published in various magazines owned by publisher Dell, but they became truly popular when they reached Japan.

Maki Kaji, then-president of the puzzle company Nikoli, first published Sudoku in April 1984 in the newspaper Monthly Nikolist. Sudoku originally meant “suji wa dokushin ni kagiru” (“the digits must be single”), but it was shortened by taking the first kanji of each compound word.

In Japan, where Sudoku is a registered trademark, it is often known as Nanpure (a contraction of nabapuresu or Number Place), and it became popular very quickly in the region.

However, the man who popularised it worldwide was Wayne Gould, a Hong Kong judge born in New Zealand who developed a computer program to automatically develop Sudoku puzzles.

By 2004, Sudoku puzzles started to appear in The Times newspaper, and its popularity was immediate, to the point that television shows based on Sudoku were broadcast on UK television by 2005.