First Sokoban program

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First Sokoban program

The first commercial Sokoban game was published in December 1982 for NEC PC-8801.

The selling agency was Thinking Rabbit, a software house based in Takarazuka, Japan.

The game was distributed as cassette tape media.

Screenshot of the entry screen of the game:

The text roughly translates to:

** Sokoban **

You have started a part-time job in a large warehouse company.

Your job is to organize 20 warehouse levels.

You must tidy up the levels.

The boxes are so large that you can only push them one at a time.

If you do a poor job the boxes will get jammed.
Hence, you have to be careful.

5 Key (Up)
1 Key (Left)
2 Key (Down)
3 Key (Right)

The boxes have to be placed on the red dots.

If the job is done or to restart press: F1-Key

Start with Space key!

The game offered 20 levels to be played.

The first 10 levels are common Sokoban levels.

Levels 11 to 20 however contain some destroyable walls. These special walls look the same as the other not destroyable walls. However, the player can walk over these walls from specific sides and thereby destroy the walls.

This is level 15 in the original game:

This is the same level having the destroyable walls highlighted in blue and the direction they can be walked over indicated by small arrows:

The levels first become solvable after destroying these special walls.

Later versions of Sokoban don't contain these special wall type anymore.

The source code of this first Sokoban game was printed in the 1987 book "THE 倉庫番", pages 117-122.