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Please list developers in their own parameter in infobox and italicize the games' names; don't revert good faith edits without reason, even Carloseow is at the right here
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Undid revision 1294494367 by Go D. Usopp (talk) It's impossible to introduce the Sokoban game with a better opening sentence than "Sokoban is a puzzle video game in which the player pushes boxes around in a warehouse, trying to get them to storage locations."
Tags: Undo Reverted
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⚫
{{Short description|1982 video game}}
{{Use mdy dates|date=June 2025}}
{{Use mdy dates|date=June 2025}}
⚫
{{Short description|1982 video game}}
{{Infobox video game series
{{Infobox video game series
| title = Sokoban
| title = Sokoban
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Various
Various
}}
}}
<!-- Add platforms if possible -->
| image = Official Sokoban website banner.png
| image = Official Sokoban website banner.png
| caption = Sokoban official fan kit banner
| caption = Sokoban official fan kit banner
| genre = [[Puzzle video game|Puzzle]]
| genre = [[Puzzle video game|Puzzle]]
| creator = Hiroyuki Imabayashi
| creator = Hiroyuki Imabayashi
| first release version = ''Sōko-ban''
| first release version = Sokoban (Thinking Rabbit)
| first release date = 1982
| first release date = 1982
| latest release version = ''The Sokoban''
| latest release version = The Sokoban (Unbalance)
| latest release date = 2021
| latest release date = 2021
}}
|developer=Thinking Rabbit<br>Unbalance|publisher=Thinking Rabbit<br>Unbalance}}
{{nihongo foot|'''''Sokoban'''''|倉庫番|''Sōko-ban''|extra={{lit|warehouse keeper}}<ref>{{cite book |author1=Yoshio Murase |author2=Hitoshi Matsubara |author3=Yuzuru Hiraga |title=Automatic Making of Sokoban Problems |editor1=Norman Foo |editor2=Randy Goebel |date=1996 |publisher=Springer Science & Business Media |isbn=978-3-540-61532-3 |page=592 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=j2QrFVEd2GUC&dq=sokoban+meaning+warehouse&pg=PA592 |language=en}}</ref>|lead=yes|group=lower-alpha}} is a series of [[puzzle video game|puzzle video games]] developed and published by Japanese studio Thinking Rabbit. The player pushes boxes around in a [[warehouse]], trying to get them to storage locations. The game was designed in 1981 by Hiroyuki Imabayashi; the first installment, '''''Sōko-ban''''', was released in 1982 for the [[NEC PC-8801]], and was followed with various sequels.
{{nihongo|'''''Sokoban'''''|倉庫番|''Sōko-ban''|lead=no|extra={{lit|warehouse keeper}}<ref>{{cite book |author1=Yoshio Murase |author2=Hitoshi Matsubara |author3=Yuzuru Hiraga |title=Automatic Making of Sokoban Problems |editor1=Norman Foo |editor2=Randy Goebel |date=1996 |publisher=Springer Science & Business Media |isbn=978-3-540-61532-3 |page=592 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=j2QrFVEd2GUC&dq=sokoban+meaning+warehouse&pg=PA592 |language=en}}</ref>}} is a [[puzzle video game]] in which the player pushes boxes around in a [[warehouse]], trying to get them to storage locations. The game was designed in 1981 by Hiroyuki Imabayashi and first published in Japan in 1982.


==Gameplay==
==Gameplay==
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|-
|-
|1990
|1990
||{{Nihongo|2=倉庫番World|3=Sokuban World}}/''Boxyboy''
|''Boxyboy''
|Japan, US
|US
|[[TurboGrafx-16]]
|[[TurboGrafx-16]]
|[[NEC]]
|[[NEC]]
|-
|-
|1990
|1990
|{{Nihongo|2=史上最大の倉庫番|3=Shijou Saidai no Soko-ban}}/''Shove It! ...The Warehouse Game''
|''Shove It! ...The Warehouse Game''
|Japan, US
|US
|[[Sega Genesis]]
|[[Sega Genesis]]
|DreamWorks
|DreamWorks
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|-
|-
|2019
|2019
|{{nihongo||みんなの倉庫番|Minna no Sokoban}}/''The Sokoban''
|{{nihongo||みんなの倉庫番|Minna no Sokoban}}
|Japan
|Japan
|[[Nintendo Switch]], [[PlayStation 4]]
|[[Nintendo Switch]], [[PlayStation 4]]
|{{ill|Unbalance|ja|UNBALANCE_(ゲーム会社)}}
|{{ill|Unbalance|ja|UNBALANCE_(ゲーム会社)}}
|-
|2021
|''The Sokoban''
|US
|Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4
|Unbalance
|}
|}


Revision as of 04:20, 8 June 2025

Sokoban
Sokoban official fan kit banner
Genre(s)Puzzle
Creator(s)Hiroyuki Imabayashi
Platform(s)
  • Various
First releaseSokoban (Thinking Rabbit)
1982
Latest releaseThe Sokoban (Unbalance)
2021

Sokoban (倉庫番, Sōko-ban, lit. 'warehouse keeper'[1]) is a puzzle video game in which the player pushes boxes around in a warehouse, trying to get them to storage locations. The game was designed in 1981 by Hiroyuki Imabayashi and first published in Japan in 1982.

Gameplay

A Sokoban puzzle being solved

The warehouse is a grid composed of floor squares and impassable wall squares. Some floor squares contain a box and some are marked as storage locations. The number of boxes equals the number of storage locations.

The player, often represented as a worker character, can move one square at a time horizontally or vertically onto empty floor squares, but cannot pass through walls or boxes.

To move a box, the player walks up to it and pushes it to an empty square directly beyond the box. Boxes cannot be pushed to squares with walls or other boxes, and they cannot be pulled.

The puzzle is solved when all boxes are on storage locations.

Progressing through the game requires careful planning and precise maneuvering.[2] A single mistake, such as pushing a box into a corner or obstructing the path of others, can render the puzzle unsolvable, forcing the player to backtrack or restart. Anticipating the consequences of each push and considering the overall layout of the puzzle are crucial to avoid deadlocks and complete the puzzle successfully.[3]

History

Sokoban was created in 1981 by Hiroyuki Imabayashi.[4][5][6] The first commercial game was published for the NEC PC-8801 in December 1982 by his company, Thinking Rabbit, based in Takarazuka, Japan. Ports and new titles for various platforms appeared in subsequent years. In 1988, Spectrum HoloByte published Sokoban in the U.S. for the IBM PC, Commodore 64, and Apple II as Soko-Ban.[7] In 2001, the Japanese software company Falcon acquired the trademarks for Sokoban and Thinking Rabbit. Since then, Falcon has continued to develop and license official Sokoban games.

Versions

Since its debut in 1982, Sokoban has been released on various platforms, primarily in Japan but also in other regions. Most titles are independent without a continuous narrative or unified series, though a few are direct sequels to a specific earlier release—for example, Sokoban 2 (1984) follows Sokoban (1982), and Soko-ban Revenge (1991) is a sequel to Soko-ban Perfect (1989). The following table lists a selection of official Sokoban titles.[8]

Year Title Country Platform Publisher
1982 Sokoban (倉庫番)[9][10] Japan NEC PC-8801 Thinking Rabbit
1983 Sokoban [Extra Edition] (倉庫番[番外編])[11] Japan NEC PC-8801 PC Magazine [ja]
1984 Sokoban 2 (倉庫番2)[12] Japan NEC PC-8801 Thinking Rabbit
1986 Namida no Sokoban Special (涙の倉庫番スペシャル) Japan Famicom Disk System ASCII
1988 Soko-Ban[13] US IBM PC, XT, and AT Spectrum HoloByte
1989 Soko-ban Perfect (倉庫番Perfect) Japan NEC PC-9801 Thinking Rabbit
1990 Boxyboy US TurboGrafx-16 NEC
1990 Shove It! ...The Warehouse Game US Sega Genesis DreamWorks
1991 Soko-ban Revenge (倉庫番Revenge) Japan NEC PC-9801 Thinking Rabbit
2016 Sokoban Touch (倉庫番Touch) Japan, US Android, iOS Thinking Rabbit
2018 Sokoban Smart (倉庫番スマート) Japan Windows Thinking Rabbit
2019 Minna no Sokoban (みんなの倉庫番) Japan Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4 Unbalance [ja]
2021 The Sokoban US Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4 Unbalance

Reception

By June 1984, the original Sokoban had sold 22,000 copies in Japan;[14] by March 1985, it had reached 30,000 copies.[15]

Sokoban was a hit in Japan, selling over 400,000 copies before being released in the United States.[16]

The 1988 American release, Soko-Ban, received a positive review from Computer Gaming World, which described the game as simple yet mentally challenging, and praised its addictive nature.[17]

Legacy

Cultural impact

An active fan community has produced thousands of custom puzzles,[18] unofficial versions, and software tools, including puzzle editors, solvers, and solution optimizers.[7]

Derivatives

Sokoban is considered the originator of a subgenre of puzzle games featuring box-pushing mechanics. These games are commonly referred to as "Sokoban-like" or "box-pushing" games".[7][19]

  • Alternative tilings: In the standard game, the mazes are laid out on a square grid. Several variants apply the rules of Sokoban to mazes laid out on other tilings. Hexoban uses regular hexagons, and Trioban uses equilateral triangles.
  • Multiple pushers: In the variant Multiban, the puzzle contains more than one pusher. In the game Sokoboxes Duo, strictly two pushers collaborate to solve the puzzle.
  • Designated storage locations: In Sokomind Plus, some boxes and target squares are uniquely numbered. In Block-o-Mania, the boxes have different colours, and the goal is to push them onto squares with matching colours.
  • Alternative game objectives: Several variants feature different objectives from the traditional Sokoban gameplay. For instance, in Interlock and Sokolor, the boxes have different colours, but the objective is to move them so that similarly coloured boxes are adjacent. In CyberBox, each level has a designated exit square, and the objective is to reach that exit by pushing boxes, potentially more than one simultaneously. In a variant called Beanstalk[20], the objective is to push the elements of the level onto a target square in a fixed sequence.
  • Additional game elements: Push Crate, Sokonex, Xsok, Cyberbox and Block-o-Mania all add new elements to the basic puzzle. Examples include holes, teleports, moving blocks and one-way passages.
  • Character actions: In Pukoban, the character can pull boxes in addition to pushing them.
  • Reverse mode: Some Sokoban programs allow players to play a puzzle backward. This approach can help players better understand the puzzle structure and develop effective solving strategies. Starting with all boxes on storage locations, the player pulls the boxes to return to the initial puzzle state. Solutions found this way solve the standard puzzle when both the order and the direction of the moves are reversed.[21]

Computer science research

Sokoban has been studied using the theory of computational complexity. The computational problem of solving Sokoban puzzles was first shown to be NP-hard.[22][23] Further work proved it is also PSPACE-complete.[24][25]

Solving non-trivial Sokoban puzzles is difficult for computers because of the high branching factor (many legal pushes at each turn) and the large search depth (many pushes needed to reach a solution).[26][27] Even small puzzles can require lengthy solutions.[28]

The Sokoban game provides a challenging testbed for developing and evaluating planning techniques.[29] The first documented automated solver, Rolling Stone, was developed at the University of Alberta. It employed a conventional search algorithm enhanced with domain-specific techniques such as deadlock detection.[30][31] A later solver, Festival, introduced the FESS search algorithm and became the first automatic system to solve all 90 puzzles in the widely used XSokoban test suite.[32][33] Despite these advances, even the most sophisticated solvers cannot solve many highly complex puzzles that humans can solve with time and effort, using their ability to plan ahead, recognize patterns, and reason about long-term consequences.[34][35][36]

See also

References

  1. ^ Yoshio Murase; Hitoshi Matsubara; Yuzuru Hiraga (1996). Norman Foo; Randy Goebel (eds.). Automatic Making of Sokoban Problems. Springer Science & Business Media. p. 592. ISBN 978-3-540-61532-3.
  2. ^ 倉庫番. MICOMGAMES (in Japanese). Vol. 1, no. 1. December 1983. p. 38. 考えずにスイスイ荷物を動 かすと, 最後は必ず行き詰まる。 倉庫番で最 も重要なのは、最初の一手、この一手を実行 する前に、先の先まで読み切ることが大切。 [If you push boxes around carelessly without thinking ahead, you will inevitably end up at a dead end. In Sokoban, the most critical move is the very first one — before making it, you must think several moves ahead and visualize all possible outcomes.]
  3. ^ Jean-Noël Demaret; François Van Lishout; Pascal Gribomont (2008). Hierarchical Planning and Learning for Automatic Solving of Sokoban Problems (PDF). pp. 1, 2. a bad move can lead in Sokoban to a deadlock, a situation in which the solution game state is not reachable anymore.
  4. ^ 考えるウサギはパソコンの [The Rabbit Who Thinks About Computers]. ログイン (雑誌) [ja] (in Japanese). December 1983. pp. 136–139.
  5. ^ "Thinking Rabbit - 1983 Developer Interview".
  6. ^ "My conversation with Mr Hiroyuki Imabayashi".
  7. ^ a b c Austin Barr; Calvin Chung; Aaron Williams (2021). Block Dude Puzzles are NP-Hard (and the Rugs Really Tie the Reductions Together) (PDF). CCCG (2021). p. 1.
  8. ^ "倉庫番の歴史". Thinking Rabbit (in Japanese). Retrieved June 2, 2025.
  9. ^ 倉庫番. MICOMGAMES (in Japanese). Vol. 1, no. 1. December 1983. p. 38. 一度やりだしたらなかなかやめられない。 [Once you start playing, it’s hard to stop.]
  10. ^ 倉庫番. パソコンゲームランキングブック. October 1983. p. 28.: scored the game 94 points out of 100.
  11. ^ 倉庫番[番外編]. PCマガジン [ja] (in Japanese). August 1983. pp. 52–56. 今回はこのゲームを開発した THINKING RABBIT さんにお願いして, 市販品とは別に10の倉庫をつくってもらいましたので [This time, we asked THINKING RABBIT, who developed this game, to build 10 warehouses separately from commercial products]
  12. ^ 倉庫番2. ログイン (雑誌) [ja] (in Japanese). July 1985. p. 76. パズルソフトのベストセラー倉庫番の新たな50面と迷路エディタがついた倉庫番 2 。 [Sokoban 2, the sequel to the bestselling puzzle game Sokoban, comes with 50 new levels and a maze editor.]
  13. ^ Lesser, Hartley; Lesser, Patricia; Lesser, Kirk (April 1988). "The Role of Computers". Dragon. No. 132. p. 84.: reviewers rated the game 4+1⁄2 out of 5 stars.
  14. ^ ソフトハウス訪問 [Visiting a Software House]. POPCOM (in Japanese). June 1984. p. 131.
  15. ^ 作者が語る自信のニューソフト [The creator presents their new software]. POPCOM (in Japanese). March 1985. p. 29.
  16. ^ Lafe Low (November 1988). "News Line; Made in Japan". inCider. p. 14.
  17. ^ Wagner, Roy (May 1988). "Puzzling Encounters" (PDF). Computer Gaming World. No. 47. pp. 42–43.
  18. ^ Petr Jarusek; Radek Pelánek (2010). "Difficulty Rating of Sokoban Puzzle". Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence and Applications. 222: 140–150. doi:10.3233/978-1-60750-675-1-140. There is a very large number of levels of the puzzle freely available on the Internet. These available levels span wide range of difficulty.
  19. ^ Robert Aubrey Hearn (2006). Games, Puzzles, and Computation (PDF) (PhD thesis). Massachusetts Institute of Technology. p. 106.
  20. ^ Ziwen Liu; Yang Chao (2017). "The Non-Deterministic Constraint Logic and Its Applications in Computational Complexity" (PDF). Computer Science and Application (in Chinese). 7. Hans Publishers: 407–413. doi:10.12677/csa.2017.75049. Retrieved June 4, 2025.
  21. ^ Frank Takes (2008). "Sokoban: Reversed Solving" (PDF).
  22. ^ Michael Fryers; Michael Greene (1995). "Sokoban" (PDF). Eureka (54): 25–32. Archived from the original (PDF) on September 5, 2024.
  23. ^ Dorit Dor; Uri Zwick (1999). "SOKOBAN and other motion planning problems". Computational Geometry. 13 (4): 215–228. doi:10.1016/S0925-7721(99)00017-6.
  24. ^ Joseph C. Culberson (1997). "Sokoban is PSPACE-complete" (PDF). Technical Report TR 97-02, Dept. Of Computing Science, University of Alberta. Archived from the original (PDF) on May 28, 2024.
  25. ^ Robert Aubrey Hearn (2006). Games, Puzzles, and Computation (PDF) (PhD thesis). Massachusetts Institute of Technology. pp. 98–100.
  26. ^ Andreas Junghanns; Jonathan Schaeffer (2001). "Sokoban: Improving the Search with Relevance Cuts" (PDF). Theoretical Computer Science. 252 (1–2): 5. doi:10.1016/S0304-3975(00)00080-3.
  27. ^ Yaron Shoham (2020). "FESS Draft" (PDF). p. 3.
  28. ^ David Holland; Yaron Shoham. "Theoretical analysis on Picokosmos 17". Archived from the original on June 7, 2016.
  29. ^ Timo Virkkala (2011). Solving Sokoban (PDF) (MSc thesis). University of Helsinki. p. 1.
  30. ^ Andreas Junghanns (1999). Pushing the Limits: New Developments in Single-Agent Search (PhD thesis). University of Alberta. doi:10.7939/R3W95103S.
  31. ^ Andreas Junghanns; Jonathan Schaeffer (2001). "Sokoban: Enhancing general single-agent search methods using domain knowledge". Artificial Intelligence. 129 (1–2): 219–251. doi:10.1016/S0004-3702(01)00109-6.
  32. ^ Yaron Shoham; Jonathan Shaeffer (2020). The FESS Algorithm: A Feature Based Approach to Single-Agent Search (PDF). 2020 IEEE Conference on Games (CoG). Osaka, Japan: IEEE. doi:10.1109/CoG47356.2020.9231929.
  33. ^ Yaron Shoham (2020). "FESS presentation at the CoG conference (17.5 minutes)" (video). archive.org.
  34. ^ Petr Jarusek; Radek Pelánek (2010). "Difficulty Rating of Sokoban Puzzle". Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence and Applications. 222: 140–150. doi:10.3233/978-1-60750-675-1-140. There exist small instances that can be quickly solved by computer (using a trivial brute force algorithm) but take humans hours to solve. At the same time, there are also instances of the puzzle, which humans can solve but which are beyond capabilities of [...] artificial intelligence solvers.
  35. ^ "Let's Logic Bots Statistics" (PDF). Retrieved October 6, 2024.
  36. ^ "Sokoban Solver Statistics - Large Test Suite". Retrieved April 14, 2024.
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