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The 15 Puzzle (1880) — The Unsolvable Move with Which Sam Loyd Fooled the World
In early 1880 a craze for the '15 Puzzle' swept America and Europe. But Sam Loyd, whom the world believed to be its inventor, was an impostor who only claimed authorship sixteen years after the craze had ended. This essay traces the box's true origin and the 1879 proof that the 'swapped 14-and-15' board Loyd staked his prize on is mathematically unsolvable, and rereads the legacy sliding puzzles left to modern digital puzzle design: the guarantee of solvability.
The Incredible Machine (1993) — The Toy Box That Made Rube Goldberg Playable
Released in 1993 by Dynamix and Sierra, The Incredible Machine laid gears, balls, fans and cats across a single screen and asked players to build Rube Goldberg contraptions. Assembled in nine months on a $36,000 budget, this toy box—together with its Free Form sandbox mode—became a headwater of the modern physics-and-contraption puzzle. This essay traces the twenty-one years until its own creators put Contraption Maker on Steam in 2014.
Mario's Picross (1995) — Picture Logic, a Form Born in 1987
Released for the Game Boy on March 14, 1995, Mario's Picross translated into play the 'picture-logic puzzle' that two inventors had independently created in Japan eight years earlier. From newspaper puzzle to game, and on to today's Steam nonograms, this is the lineage of a single logic puzzle that survived almost half a century without changing its core.
Sokoban (1982) — The 44-Year-Old Prototype of Meta-Puzzles
In 1982, Hiroyuki Imabayashi of Thinking Rabbit released Sokoban. Forty-four years later, walk-and-push is still the bedrock of Baba Is You and Patrick's Parabox. Reading the lineage backward from period context.