Sokoban

Sokoban (倉庫番, Sōko-ban; lit. 'warehouse keeper') 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.