Soko-ban

倉庫番

Soko-ban is the Japanese word for warehouse worker. It is written with three kanji, 倉, which means warehouse, storehouse, cellar, treasury; 庫, which means roughly the same; and 番 which surprisingly means turn as in turn-based. The hiragana equivalent (which I've found, so far, only on the title of Super Soko-ban for the Super Famicom) is そうこばん, so-u-ko-ba-n. Soukoban is thus often considered the correct transcription, but the name of the game was always spelled Soko-ban when written in romaji, as for example on the title screen of Soko-ban Perfect:

Sokoban Perfect on the MSX2 Soko-ban was developed in 1980 by Hiroyuki Imabayashi and won the first prize on a contest. He released the first commercial version two years later under the label Thinking Rabbit for NEC PC-8801, PC 8001mk2, and Fujitsu FM-7 on tape. Several other platforms followed the next year. The original version had only twenty level, of which the second ten had false walls which had to be passed through to solve the puzzles.

Soko-ban as we know it saw the light of day 1984. Hiroyuki Imabayashi released a revised version, Soko-ban 2, with the 50 levels nowadays considered original. And he licensed it to ASCII, who would later be the publishers of Yoji Ojima's RPG Makers, for further distribution. ASCII ported both the original and the revised game to MSX, and later created a Famicom version, Namida no Soukoban Special, which has, I think, a different set of levels. But most important they sub-licensed it to Spectrum HoloByte for distribution outside Japan, and thus the rest of the world first learned about this game.

Official Versions

This list is far from complete. I ignore the versions for handhelds like Game Boy and Game Gear, and I ignore everything after 1992. Development of new official versions continues to this day.

Soko-ban, 1982ff.
Soko-ban 2, 1984.
Namida no Soukoban Special, 1986, Famicom.
Soko-ban by Spectrum Holobyte, ca. 1987.
Soko-ban Perfect, 1989, with 306 levels. The screenshots on this page are from this version.
Soukoban Deluxe, 1990, Coin-Op. It was called Boxyboy outside Japan.
Soko-ban Revenge, 1991, again with 306 levels, all of them user-created.
Super Soukoban, 1992, Super Famicom.

While it was not official, XSokoban (ca. 1992) deserves mention here. Due to its open-sourced nature, many freeware clones build on it, and it has probably made Soko-ban known outside Japan as much as the official Spectrum Holobyte version.

Freeware and Shareware Clones

Most of these games are just interfaces for previously existing puzzles, usually those in the Spectrum Holobyte version of Soko-ban. A few however took the Soko-ban concept and turned it into something new.

Soko-ban for DOS