A short history of the nonogram

The form has two origin stories that converge in the late 1980s, which is part of why it has so many names.

The Japanese half: in 1987, the graphic designer Non Ishida developed a pictorial logic puzzle that resolved into a small image based on numeric clues running along the rows and columns. The puzzle ran in Japanese magazines and became the prototype for what Japan would soon know as hanjie or picture-drawing logic. A second Japanese setter was working on similar puzzles independently around the same time — the form was clearly in the air.

The British half, a few years later: the puzzle editor James Dalgety picked up the form for The Telegraph and coined the English-language name nonogram — a portmanteau of Non Ishida and gram (mark, drawing). The Telegraph and other UK puzzle outlets began running them through 1990.

The two streams stayed largely separate for a few years. Then the international puzzle community caught up, and by the mid-1990s nonograms were appearing in puzzle magazines in the Netherlands, Germany, France, and the United States, each market giving the form its own name: paint-by-numbers in some UK editions, griddler in others, kare karala in some Asian markets, malen-nach-zahlen in German, and so on.

The next big inflection was 1995, when Nintendo licensed the form for the Game Boy as Mario's Picross. Picross — a portmanteau of picture crossword — became the form's de facto name in video games and stayed that way through Picross DS (2007), Picross e (3DS, from 2013 onward), and the Picross S series on Switch. A generation of players outside Japan first met the form through picross without knowing about Ishida's puzzles or Dalgety's name.

The puzzle-app era starting around 2010 collapsed the regional naming entirely. Hungry Cat Picross, Conceptis Pic-a-Pix, Logic Pic, and dozens of others appeared on iOS and Android, each using whichever name had brand value in its target market. Most non-Japanese English-speaking solvers today know the form interchangeably as nonogram or picross, with the latter slightly more common in casual contexts and the former in puzzle-magazine and crossword-adjacent ones.

A few notable threads in the form's evolution since the late 1990s. Multi-colour variants emerged in the early 2000s — clues carry colours, runs of each colour are tracked separately. They never quite displaced the black-and-white original but have a steady audience. Solver software matured in parallel: tools that not only solve nonograms but rate their difficulty by the techniques required to finish them have made puzzle-setting more rigorous, especially for the harder grids that need contradiction-based reasoning. Custom-puzzle communities on Reddit and dedicated nonogram forums let solvers commission and exchange grids on subjects from cats to album covers, which keeps the form genuinely current decades after Ishida's first prototype.

The form is older than the internet's oldest puzzle subculture, younger than crossword culture, and roughly the same age as Sudoku. None of these forms borrowed from each other directly — they emerged independently, in three different countries, in a fifteen-year window — but together they're most of what people mean today when they say "logic puzzle."