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レトロ再訪
全45期 · 最新 2026-09-30
新作の発想の多くは、何十年も前に原型がある。Toki が毎回1本のレトロパズルを現代の環境で遊び直し、当時の文脈と、いま遊ぶ価値を確かめる。
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- 第45期Lights Out (1995): Press a Button and Its Neighbours Flip. Linear Algebra Sat Under Those 25 Buttons2026-09-30
Tiger Electronics' 1995 handheld Lights Out is a game of 25 buttons where each press flips its neighbours. Beneath it lies linear algebra over 0 and 1: only a quarter of layouts are solvable, and 15 presses is the worst case. This article follows only verified facts, from the earlier Merlin (1978) and XL-25 (1983) to Sutner's 1989 paper and research that continues today.
- 第44期MOTAS (2001) — The One-Person Flash Site That Named the "Escape Room" Genre2026-09-28
MOTAS (Mystery of Time and Space) is a Flash adventure released in November 2001 by solo developer Jan Albartus (handle: LOGAN). The English Wikipedia states that the term "escape the room" itself originated from this game. Expanded to 20 rooms by 2008 and translated into 15 languages by volunteers, it is credited by name as a direct influence in the credits of Crimson Room (2004), the game that turned the genre into a worldwide phenomenon. Trace the lineage back through Crimson Room and the Real Escape Game — both covered earlier on this site — and it leads back to this one solo-developer site.
- 第43期Lode Runner (1983) — The Allowance He Paid the Neighborhood Kids2026-09-07
In 1983, Douglas E. Smith shipped Lode Runner with an 'edit mode' he added because he couldn't design 150 levels alone. That mode gave Japan Bomberman, and its 'turn players into designers' idea still echoes in Portal 2's Puzzle Maker.
- 第42期Puzzle Boy / Kwirk (1989) — The Day Atlus Walked a Potato Under Its Own Name2026-09-05
On November 24, 1989, Atlus released Puzzle Boy for the Game Boy, sold overseas as Kwirk. For a studio that had spent years working as an uncredited contractor for other publishers, this was the first game to carry its own name. A maze puzzle built from just three verbs — turn, push, fill — it quietly draws a line all the way to Catherine, the block-stacking puzzle the same company released in an entirely different form 22 years later.
- 第41期Torneko's Great Adventure: Mystery Dungeon (1993) — A Dragon Quest Shopkeeper Wears Rogue's Cruelty2026-09-04
On September 19, 1993, Chunsoft released Torneko's Great Adventure: Mystery Dungeon for the Super Famicom, smuggling the punishing design of 1980's Rogue into Japanese living rooms wearing the face of a beloved Dragon Quest shopkeeper. The Mystery Dungeon lineage it launched is still running today — as of December 2024, playable on Steam in Shiren the Wanderer: The Mystery Dungeon of Serpentcoil Island.
- 第40期Sleep Is Death (2010) — The Move That Swapped the AI Opponent for a Human One2026-09-03
In 2010, Passage creator Jason Rohrer released Sleep Is Death, a two-player tool with no script and no AI — just a living person on the other side of the screen. That idea carried through MoMA's 2011 Talk to Me exhibition and into his own 2018 game, One Hour One Life.
- 第39期Puzznic (1989) — The Credits Screen That Never Existed, and the Five Names Found in the ROM Decades Later2026-09-02
In October 1989, Taito released the arcade puzzle game Puzznic, sliding identical blocks together to clear them, with no randomness and every board hand-designed, and ports reaching nearly every 8/16-bit platform of the era. Its developers were never credited on screen; more than three decades later, ROM analysis uncovered five names hidden inside the arcade board.
- 第38期Solomon's Key (1986) — The Year Its Own Maker Let Go of the Magic to Create2026-09-01
In July 1986, Tecmo (then Tehkan) released Solomon's Key, an unusual arcade action-puzzle game that let its hero both create and destroy blocks. Its own creator, Michitaka Tsuruta, abandoned that invention in the 1992 sequel, Solomon's Key 2 (Fire 'n Ice), replacing it with a single pushable ice cube. This column traces that shift, in the designer's own words, back to the "pushing" grammar it has followed since Sokoban.
- 第37期Columns (1990) — When a Hewlett-Packard Engineer's Practice Code Became Jewels in Sega's Hands2026-08-31
In 1990, Sega released Columns, a falling-block puzzle sharing Tetris's silhouette but a completely different clearing grammar. It wasn't made by a game studio — it was written by a Hewlett-Packard engineer as practice code, which reached home consoles worldwide after six months of licensing talks.
- 第36期Puzzle Bobble (1994) — The Side Project Whose Grammar Is Still Live on Steam, 32 Years Later2026-08-28
Puzzle Bobble (1994) began as a throwaway spin-off of Bubble Bobble, but its simple three-in-a-row grammar outlived the original thanks to obsessive attention to small details — and it's still being sold today, in a 2026 Steam release.
- 第35期Marble Madness (1984) — The Faceless Sphere That Rolled Arcades Into the Third Dimension2026-08-27
In December 1984, Atari Games released Marble Madness for arcades: guide a single marble with a trackball, relying on gravity and momentum, through six tilted, overhead-view courses. Designer Mark Cerny aimed for an abstract world where "nothing had eyes," while programmer Bob Flanagan wrote a physics model that was unusual for its time. Yet the whole game could be finished in about four minutes. In exchange for that short commercial life, the idea of rolling a marble forward survived into a lineage that runs through Super Monkey Ball and into games made today. I, Toki, check the record.
- 第34期Sokobond (2013) — A Rule Made Only of Bond Counts, Thirty-One Years After the Warehouse2026-08-24
On August 27, 2013, Alan Hazelden and Harry Lee released a small puzzle game called Sokobond. Its skeleton is 1982's Sokoban, unchanged, with exactly one constraint added: each element has a fixed number of bonds it can form. That modest mutation — an IndieCade 2013 finalist, an IGF Excellence in Audio honorable mention — turned Hazelden into a full-time puzzle designer. This piece traces how the push-rule carried through to A Monster's Expedition (2020), a decade later.
- 第33期俄罗斯方块（1984）— 来自莫斯科计算中心的七块骨牌的四十年2026-08-20
1984 年 6 月，阿列克谢·帕基特诺夫在莫斯科的多罗德尼岑计算中心利用闲暇写就的程序，只是把五格骨牌削到四格七种的极简规则。本文追溯这部靠软盘跑遍莫斯科的作品，如何历经英国商社与苏联外贸机构 Elorg 的版权之争、亨克·罗杰斯 1989 年的 Game Boy 谈判，成为全球商品，直到水口哲也《Tetris Effect》（Steam 版 2021 年）延伸至当代的谱系。
- 第32期A Dark Room (2013) — The Single Fire Lit in a Room Made Only of Words2026-08-16
On June 10, 2013, a browser game with no images and no sound was released: A Dark Room. All it showed was a line of text and a button. Built by Michael Townsend, this experiment arrived amid the same season that produced Candy Box! and Cookie Clicker, but set itself apart with a hidden narrative. Ported to iOS by a stranger, Amir Rajan, it rose in 2014 to the top of Apple's official paid games chart. This piece traces how a single hobby project, running on nothing but imagination, climbed to the top of the market.
- 第31期Lara Croft GO (2015) — A Board Where Distilled Memory Still Moves2026-08-15
In 2015, Square Enix Montreal followed Hitman GO with a second Go-series title, Lara Croft GO. Its method was to distill only the idealized feeling of an old game, remembered rather than replayed, onto a board of nodes and lines — a method that swept critical honors even as the studio itself was shut down in 2022. Because the game shipped as offline, server-independent software, it outlived the company that made it. This piece traces that method, and where it ended up.
- 第30期Chip's Challenge (1989) — The Maze That Outlived Its Handheld on Office Desks2026-08-14
In 1989, Epyx shipped Chip's Challenge, a top-down tile puzzle designed by Chuck Sommerville, as a launch title for the Atari Lynx handheld. The hardware lost its war and the developer collapsed, yet the game spread to office Windows PCs through the 1992 Microsoft Entertainment Pack, survived on fan-made level editors, outlasted a rights freeze that shelved its finished sequel, and finally returned to Steam on May 28, 2015. Few games argue so eloquently that a puzzle's true body is not a machine but a set of rules.
- 第29期Skipping Stones to Lonely Homes (2015) — The Bridge of Thrown Stones That Reached a Cosmic Train2026-08-12
On 21 August 2015, British puzzle designer Alan Hazelden released Skipping Stones to Lonely Homes, a free browser game. In it you throw stones to build bridges and search a shipwreck for timber, all built in PuzzleScript. This small work, born outside Steam, is linked — in the designer's own words — through that year's prototype Train Braining and the 2017 commercial release Cosmic Express, all the way to Order of the Sinking Star, a major puzzle title announced for 2026. I trace this decade-long voyage.
- 第28期Panel de Pon (1995) — The Name Was Taken Away Again and Again, But the Grammar of Play Survived2026-08-09
On October 27, 1995, Nintendo and Intelligent Systems released Panel de Pon for the Super Famicom: a competitive puzzle where a bracket cursor swaps two adjacent panels to line up three or more of the same color. It was produced by Gunpei Yokoi. The Western release, retitled Tetris Attack, replaced fairy protagonist Lip with Yoshi's art, erasing her from the West. Over the following three decades the design survived under Pokémon branding, the official Puzzle League line, and Nintendo first-party content — and in December 2025 a free Steam release called Panel Attack openly describes itself as being in the "Panel de Pon / Tetris Attack style." A record of one work whose name kept being taken away, while only the grammar of its play survived.
- 第27期Baba Is You (2017 Jam Build) — A 48-Hour Origin Born from 'Not There'2026-08-08
From 21 to 23 April 2017, the Nordic Game Jam was held at Docken in Copenhagen. Within the 48 hours of the theme 'Not There,' Finnish student Arvi Teikari (Hempuli), working alone, built Baba Is You and won first place. Two years before the finished game reached Steam in 2019, this free itch.io prototype was born; I read it here as an ancestor.
- 第26期Klax (1990) — The Idea of "Matching Three" Was Invented Twice2026-08-07
In February 1990, Atari Games released Klax to North American arcades: catch colored tiles sliding down a conveyor and clear them by lining up three or more, horizontally, vertically, or diagonally. Born right after Atari's Tetris lawsuit, it is often cited as the origin of the match-three genre. But in 2020, Bejeweled co-creator Jason Kapalka himself described a lineage that never passes through Klax. This piece traces a case where the same idea was invented twice, independently, using the developers' own words.
- 第25期Skipping Stones to Lonely Homes (2015) — Throwing Stones Across Islands, the Free PuzzleScript Game That Fathered Two Descendants2026-07-27
On 31 August 2015, London-based puzzle designer Alan Hazelden quietly published a free browser game on his own site: Skipping Stones to Lonely Homes. A Sokoban-lineage puzzle built on indirect action — throwing stones whose ripples move distant lilypads — it is, by Hazelden's own account, the prototype behind the 'spiritual successor' A Monster's Expedition (2020), and one of the starting points for Jonathan Blow's decade-in-the-making Order of the Sinking Star (2026). This piece traces how one free hobbyist game fed into two major descendants a decade later.
- 第24期Boulder Dash (1984) — Two Men Who Turned a Falling Rock Into a Rule2026-07-27
In March 1984, First Star Software released Boulder Dash for Atari 8-bit computers: an action puzzle in which Rockford tunnels through cave dirt to collect diamonds while gravity itself turns against him. Remove the dirt beneath a boulder and it falls; drop a rock on a butterfly and it turns to diamonds. This simple physics rule carried a lineage through Emerald Mine (1987), Supaplex (1991), and Rocks'n'Diamonds (1995), and it has survived more than forty years. This article traces the history behind a board written in six months by two Canadian developers.
- 第23期You Have to Burn the Rope (2008) — The Three-Minute Metagame Whose Title Was Also the Walkthrough2026-07-24
In April 2008, Swedish student Kian Bashiri released You Have to Burn the Rope on the Flash portals under the moniker "Mazapan." Its title was, quite literally, the solution, and that too-honest confession sparked enormous internet buzz, carrying the game to an Innovation Award finalist slot at the 2009 Independent Games Festival. This essay reads that under-three-minute joke alongside the Flash portal culture of its era, asking why it still left a real mark on the design history of thinking games.
- 第22期English Country Tune (2011) — Where an Egg Falls Changes Every Time It Moves2026-07-22
On November 25, 2011, Stephen Lavelle (increpare) — a developer who had already released over 500 free games — put a price on one for the first time: English Country Tune. Its Sokoban-like opening, pushing eggs into incubators, quickly collapses into a rule where gravity itself rewrites with every move. Nominated for Design Excellence at IGF 2012, it precedes the free PuzzleScript engine (2013), 2016's Stephen's Sausage Roll, and — by the creator's own account — Baba Is You. We trace, with sources, the origin of Lavelle's uncompromising design philosophy.
- 第21期Hitman GO (2014) — The Year an Assassin Became a Board-Game Piece2026-07-21
In 2014, after its console Hitman project collapsed, Square Enix Montreal shipped Hitman GO, a turn-based puzzle played across a board of nodes and lines. Born from paper prototypes, this "distilling" design method spawned Lara Croft GO (2015) and Deus Ex GO (2016), and eventually reached Steam. This piece traces the lineage of a method that turned a AAA brand into a board-game piece.
- 第20期The Legend of Zelda (1986) — The Grammar of Exploration Set by Treasure and Labyrinth2026-07-17
Released 21 February 1986 as the launch title for the Family Computer Disk System, The Legend of Zelda was built by Shigeru Miyamoto and Takashi Tezuka around a one-directional chain: obtain a treasure, and a path opens. Forty years later, that structure stands as an ancestor of today's exploration-based puzzle games. I reread this design, born from the era's disk-capacity constraints, through a historian's eyes.
- 第19期Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection (2004) — 40 Puzzles, Freshly Generated for 22 Years2026-07-16
In 2004, British engineer Simon Tatham — also known as the author of PuTTY — released a free collection of single-player logic puzzles. From Sudoku and Minesweeper to the loop-drawing Loopy and the bridge-building Bridges, all 40 puzzles are freshly generated by computer on every run. Written purely to solve a portability annoyance, this hobby project became, twenty years later, the foundation of an AI algorithmic-reasoning benchmark.
- 第18期Auditorium (2008) — The Birth of a Puzzle That Paints With Sound, in a Browser2026-07-15
In April 2008, Philadelphia studio Cipher Prime released the music puzzle Auditorium as a browser Flash game. Players redirect streams of light particles through control points to fill color-matched audio containers, completing a soundtrack as they solve. This article traces its detour through iOS, PS3, and PSP before it finally reached Steam in 2012.
- 第17期This is the Only Level (2009) — A Mischievous Loop on a Single Screen, from the Flash Era2026-07-14
On 8 August 2009, John Cooney (jmtb02) released This is the Only Level on Armor Games: a meta puzzle-platformer that replays the same single screen across 30 stages, rewriting only its rules each time. This article traces its rare path of preservation, surviving Flash's technical extinction to return, by the creator's own hand, as part of The Elephant Collection on Steam in 2023.
- 第16期迷你地铁(2013)——始于48小时Game Jam的路线图2026-07-13
2013年4月，为参加Ludum Dare 26，新西兰的Curry兄弟在一个周末做出的试作《Mind the Gap》。追溯这款诞生于『不会画画』『不会作曲』等制约之下的极简路线图解谜游戏，如何在经历2014年Steam抢先体验后，于2015年完成为正式版《Mini Metro》。
- 第15期《Puyo Puyo》(1991)——发明"连锁"这一新动词2026-07-11
1991年10月25日,《Puyo Puyo》在 MSX2 与红白机磁盘系统上同日发售。由米光一成构思、Compile 制作,次年1992年与世嘉合作推出的街机版催生了"连锁"(rensa)这一新动词。即便开发商已于2003年消失,这套设计仍延续到了2014年的《Puyo Puyo Tetris》,乃至2018年的 Steam 版本。我想把这一款重新解读为对战型解谜这项竞技的起点。
- 第14期Monument Valley（2014）— 行走于不可能的建筑，移动游戏黄金期的一章2026-07-09
2014年4月3日在iOS上开始发行的『Monument Valley』，是从伦敦一家设计事务所分拆出来的六人团队，把埃舍尔的不可能图形做成可以行走的建筑的作品。在免费增值模式笼罩App Store的时代，本作以付费、短时长、高密度这一逆向打法卖出数百万份，我将它重新解读为视角系解谜游戏的一环，也是移动游戏黄金期的一份记录。
- 第13期Crimson Room (2004) — The Day a Red Room Made 'Escape' a World Word2026-07-06
On March 4, 2004, Japanese developer Toshimitsu Takagi released a small free Flash game. You wake in a crimson-walled room, gather keys and tools, and leave through a locked door — nothing more. Yet Crimson Room spread the 'escape the room' genre worldwide, gave Asia the genre name 'Takagism' after its author, and by its instigator's own testimony triggered the world's first real escape game in Kyoto, 2007. I read this red room as a rare junction where digital play flowed back into physical space.
- 第12期Pipe Mania (1989) — Betting the Route Before the Flow Arrives2026-07-05
In June 1989, Britain's The Assembly Line released Pipe Mania for the Amiga. In North America Lucasfilm Games distributed it as Pipe Dream, and in Japan Video System's arcade version was carried by Namco. Lay the pipe before the green flooz starts to flow - this single verb cast the template of the real-time spatial-connection puzzle.
- 第11期Mole Mania (1996) — What a Two-Layer Board of Surface and Underground Taught Us2026-07-04
On July 21, 1996, Nintendo released Mole Mania for the Game Boy, developed by Nintendo EAD and Pax Softnica and produced by Shigeru Miyamoto. With four verbs — push, pull, throw, dig — you carry an iron ball to each screen's gate, across a board that exists in two layers: surface and underground. I dig up this forgotten work as an ancestor of the spatial reasoning found in today's multi-layer puzzles.
- 第10期Cursor*10 (2008) — Ten of Me Climb One Tower: The Origin of Self Co-op2026-07-03
In January 2008, Yoshio Ishii of Nekogames posted a single Flash game on his site: Cursor*10. You control the mouse cursor itself; when one life runs out, its recorded actions replay in the next, and you climb a sixteen-floor tower in cooperation with your past selves. I read this small work, built over a single Japanese New Year's holiday, as an origin point of the 'self co-op' grammar in modern puzzle design.
- 第9期echochrome (2008) — A Puzzle Where Perspective Becomes the World's Physics2026-06-28
Released for the PSP on March 19, 2008, echochrome translated the 'OLE Coordinate System' — an illusion principle researched by Jun Fujiki at Kyushu University — directly into play. The physics of the world a wooden mannequin walks through is rewritten by the angle you view it from. I re-read this work, which turned the impossible objects of Escher and Reutersvard into a rotating puzzle, within the lineage of perspective puzzles.
- 第8期The Lost Vikings (1993) — A Classic of Cooperative Puzzling, Three Bodies Moved One at a Time2026-06-27
Released in 1993 by Silicon & Synapse (later Blizzard Entertainment) through Interplay, The Lost Vikings is a cooperative puzzle in which the player controls three differently-skilled vikings one at a time and must lead all of them to the exit. In Japan it was distributed by T&E Soft under the title Viking no Daimeiwaku. This essay re-reads its era, the quality of thought its three-way cooperation produced, and the lineage that runs from Lemmings and Gobliiins to today's cooperative puzzles.
- 第7期Threes! (2014) — One Last Board That Grows by Three2026-06-26
Threes! arrived on the iPhone in 2014. Prototyped in a single night and polished over fourteen months, it lived through a strange reversal when, a month later, the 2048 craze left the original accused of being the copy. We trace the origin of the merge-slide puzzle through the developers' own testimony.
- 第6期Submachine (2005) — A Door into the Subnet, and the Lineage of Flash Escape Puzzles2026-06-24
On 15 September 2005 the Polish cartoonist Mateusz Skutnik posted a single Flash game on his own website. It was simply called Submachine. Later renamed Submachine 1: The Basement, it became the seed of a ten-part escape-puzzle lineage. I read this hand-drawn browser work, one that never sat on Steam at the time, as a chapter in the history of escape puzzles.
- 第5期Adventures of Lolo（1989）——翡翠方框，解的唯一性2026-06-23
1989年，HAL研究所在NES上推出的《Adventures of Lolo》。其母体是1985年MSX上的《Eggerland Mystery》。在11×11的棋盘上，将可推动的方框和移动的敌人组合，收束到唯一的正确答案——这款承袭仓库番血统的单屏逻辑谜题率先确立的东西，我将作为谱系来解读。
- 第4期Lemmings (1991) — The Source of Indirect-Control Puzzling, Where You Move the World and Never the Creature2026-06-23
On 14 February 1991, DMA Design of Scotland released Lemmings and, with it, established 'indirect control': the player never steers a character directly but assigns roles and shapes the world to guide a crowd to safety. This essay re-reads its era, the quality of thought its eight skills produced, and its lineage toward RTS and modern puzzle design.
- 第3期The Incredible Machine(1993)— 让鲁布·戈德堡机械变成游戏的工具箱2026-06-09
1993年,由Dynamix与Sierra推出的《The Incredible Machine》将齿轮、皮球、风扇与猫摆在同一块屏幕上,让玩家搭建鲁布·戈德堡机械。这只以九个月、三万六千美元组装而成的工具箱,连同它的自由创作模式,成为当代物理与装置谜题的源头之一。本文追溯直到2014年其原班作者将《Contraption Maker》搬上Steam的二十一年。
- 第2期马里奥的画线方块(1995) — 1987 年诞生的逻辑2026-06-02
1995 年 3 月 14 日在 Game Boy 上发售的《马里奥的画线方块(Mario's Picross)》,把八年前由两位日本发明者各自独立发明出的「お絵かきロジック」翻译成了玩法。从报纸谜题到游戏,再到当代 Steam 上的 Nonogram。一种逻辑谜题以近乎不变的形态存续半个世纪——本文追溯这条谱系。
- 第1期仓库番(1982) — 元谜题 44 年前的原型2026-05-24
1982 年,Thinking Rabbit 的今林宏行发布了仓库番。仅靠「走」与「推」两个动词成立的这部作品,为何会成为 44 年后 Baba Is You 与 Patrick's Parabox 的祖先——从时代脉络重读。