Othello (1973) — The Year a Game Whose Patent Was Rejected Was Proven, Half a Century Later, to End in a Draw

Introduction — Rules That Belonged to No One

Othello: black and white discs on a green board, flipped by sandwiching the opponent's row between your own pieces. Tsukuda, a Japanese toy maker, released it in 1973, and it's now played in more than 100 countries. What interests me most is one specific fact: no one has ever legally owned this game's rules.

In 1971, its credited inventor, Goro Hasegawa, filed a utility model application for the game. It never passed examination; the rejection became final. Because the rules belonged to no one, I'd argue, they could be freely copied everywhere, and now live inside every smartphone.

In this piece, I go back further than Tsukuda's 1973 release: to a fraud dispute in 19th-century England, to a record already present in Japan before Hasegawa was born, and to the origin story Hasegawa himself retold, differently, decades later. It's the nearly 150-year lineage of a disc that slipped out of anyone's hands.

Impression of a disc mid-flip (illustration, AI-generated)

Historical Context — Two Englishmen Who Called Each Other Thieves

Othello's forebear, Reversi, surfaced in 19th-century England. In 1883, two Englishmen, Lewis Waterman and John W. Mollett, each claimed to have invented it and publicly accused the other of plagiarism. Neither claim was ever settled; only the dispute survives in the record.

The earliest print mention is usually dated to The Saturday Review, August 21, 1886. In December 1895, The New York Times described it as "something like Go Bang... played with 64 pieces." The German publisher Ravensburger was already manufacturing it by 1893, as one of its earliest products.

More surprising still: a 1907 Japanese publication, roughly translated as World Games Rules Complete Collection, already recorded rules nearly identical to modern Othello — the four-disc diagonal starting position, and a rule to pass when no move is available. That's 25 years before Goro Hasegawa was even born.

Impression of two competing records (illustration, AI-generated)

Mechanics — What It Meant to Fix the Rules to One Version

The rule's skeleton is simple: sandwich a row of the opponent's discs between a piece you just placed and another piece you already own, and every disc in between flips to your color. It's simple enough to explain in one sentence, yet deep enough that the endgame still resists being fully read out.

19th-century Reversi varied by source — board size, starting layout, none of it fixed. What Hasegawa nailed down was three things: an 8x8 board, a four-disc diagonal starting position at the center, and a rule that a player with no legal move forfeits their turn. A loosely defined pastime became one precise, reproducible ruleset.

Once the rules were fixed, the game moved onto screens almost immediately. In 1978, Nintendo ran an arcade cabinet called Computer Othello — five years before the company's own Donkey Kong (1983), which this site has covered before.

Impression of the sandwich-and-flip rule (illustration, AI-generated)

Legacy — A Retold Origin, and a Computer's Clean Sweep

Even Hasegawa's own origin story isn't one fixed thing. At the 1973 launch, he acknowledged Reversi's influence and said that, as an adult in 1964, he'd revived the game at female coworkers' request, using the paper liners from milk bottle caps. But sometime around 2000, the story shifted: now he said he'd invented it independently as a boy in Mito, right after the war ended in 1945. The same man's memory survives in two different shapes from two different decades — and I have no way, from here, to judge which one is more accurate.

The name, at least, is settled. It came from his father, Shirō, an English literature professor, who suggested naming it after Shakespeare's Othello — likening the black and white discs flipping on a green board to the drama between the Moor Othello and the pale Desdemona.

In 1973, Tsukuda began selling it on April 25 at the Mitsukoshi and Isetan flagship stores, followed by a nationwide release as "Official Othello" on April 29. The Japan Othello Association was founded the same year, and the World Othello Championship has run annually since 1977.

In August 1997, a program called Logistello, built by Michael Buro, played the reigning world champion Takeshi Murakami and swept him six games to none. It's one of the early cases of a computer surpassing the human summit at a board game — and, in a coincidence of timing rather than any causal link, chess's Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov that same year, making 1997 a year when human-versus-computer milestones piled up.

Then, in 2023, Japanese researcher Hiroki Takizawa computationally solved Othello: if both sides play perfectly, the game always ends in a draw — a conclusion that arrived exactly half a century after 1973. The paper was timed to coincide with that year's World Othello Championship, held in Rome. And because the rules still belong to no one, indie developer Clyde Smets released Reversi Temple on Steam in 2024 — boards can now scale up to 3,600 tiles, but the core rule hasn't changed in 151 years.

Impression of a board leading into a computation grid (illustration, AI-generated)

Sources

Sources consulted for this article:

・Wikipedia: Reversi

・Wikipedia: Goro Hasegawa

・Wikipedia (Japanese): Othello (board game)

・Wikipedia (Japanese): Goro Hasegawa

・Wikipedia: Logistello

・arXiv: Takizawa, "Othello is Solved" (2023)

・Boing Boing: Othello solved: best play leads to a draw

・Wikipedia: Othello (1981 video game, Atari 2600)

・Arcade History: Computer Othello (Nintendo, 1978)

・Steam: Reversi Temple

Closing — Like the Discs, the Story Flips Too

Othello's rules never became anyone's property. Because of that, they could be freely copied everywhere, taking up residence in arcade cabinets and, eventually, smartphones. I'd guess that never being patented was the single biggest reason this game spread as far as it did.

And the origin story itself flipped, the way a disc flips on the board. The 1973 version — "coworkers asked me to" — turned, by around 2000, into "a boy in Mito worked it out alone, right after the war." A historian's job isn't to decide which version is true. It's to record the fact that the story flipped at all.

From a fraud dispute in 19th-century London to a 2023 proof that the game ends in a draw: a single disc, owned by no one, has kept rolling for nearly 150 years, from a wooden board into the inside of a computer.

Impression of a single quiet disc (illustration, AI-generated)