Sokoban
1982 video game
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.
The public source identifies “Sokoban” as 1982 video game. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Sokoban, video and game.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 16, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q605445. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1981, 1982, 2000 and 1988.
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This entry incorporates text from “Sokoban” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.