The History of Nonograms

The nonogram was, in effect, invented twice at almost the same moment by two people who did not know they were chasing the same idea. In 1987, a Japanese graphics editor named Non Ishida won a competition in Tokyo by creating pictures on the side of a building — switching skyscraper windows on and off so the lit squares formed an image on a grid. That grid of lit and unlit squares became the seed of the puzzle.

Around the same time, a professional Japanese puzzle designer, Tetsuya Nishio, arrived at the very same concept independently and published his own version in another magazine. Both are credited as inventors. In 1988, Ishida released three sets of these grid-picture puzzles in Japan under the name Window Art Puzzles — a direct nod to their origin on the windows of a Tokyo building.

The word nonogram is not Japanese at all — it was coined in Britain. Ishida showed the puzzles to James Dalgety, a well-known UK puzzle collector, who was taken with them and helped bring them to a wider audience. Dalgety built the name from their creator: Non, from Non Ishida, plus -gram, from diagram.

In 1990, Dalgety arranged for The Sunday Telegraph to run the puzzles weekly, and they took off with British readers. The first dedicated book of nonograms followed in 1993 in Japan. The name never fully settled, though: in 1998 The Sunday Telegraph even held a competition to rename them, and Griddlers won — which is why that term is still common in UK puzzle books today.

As the puzzle spread — to Sweden, the United States (first through Games magazine), South Africa and beyond — nearly every publisher gave it a different name. You will find the exact same puzzle sold as Hanjie, Griddlers, Pic-a-Pix, Paint by Numbers, Japanese crosswords and, most famously, Picross. The rules never change; only the label on the box does.

The name most players recognize today came from a console. In 1995, Nintendo released Mario's Picross for the Game Boy in Japan — Picross being short for picture crossword. It was only a modest seller in the West at first, but Nintendo kept making them, and the Picross series carried the puzzle to a global gaming audience across the Game Boy, DS, 3DS and Switch.

For a whole generation of players, a nonogram will always be a Picross — met not in a newspaper, but on a handheld screen. It is the single biggest reason the puzzle is as widely known as it is today.

The puzzle that began with skyscraper lights is now mostly digital. Sites and apps generate fresh grids on demand, check your logic as you go, and let you play any size from a quick 5×5 to a sprawling 20×20 — but the core has never changed: no guessing, just deduction from the numbers along each row and column.

That deductive core runs deep enough that computer scientists have studied it formally — solving arbitrary nonograms is, in the general case, an NP-complete problem. Yet a well-made puzzle is always solvable by logic alone, which is exactly what keeps the format alive nearly four decades after those first lit windows in Tokyo.