Sokoban

Sokoban is a puzzle video game series in which 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.

Hiroyuki Imabayashi created the first Sokoban game as a hobby in 1981; his company, Thinking Rabbit, commercially released the first enhanced version in 1982. After that first release, Thinking Rabbit and its licensed partners developed new titles until 2000. The series 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 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 level of thought required.

Sokoban's core mechanics have been replicated in numerous clones. The series has inspired thousands of community-created puzzles, as well as Sokoban-like games. 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 puzzles have been studied in the fields of computational complexity and artificial intelligence.