A Brief History of... Gomoku

For the next A Brief History Of article, we're actually taking our first real adventure over to Japan. Bet you didn't think the first Japanese game I'd be covering was a board game, eh? It's funny how things play out when tackling gaming chronologically.

Of course, Japan is going to be a massive player - nay, the defining player in the video game industry come the late 1970s-onward, thanks largely in part to Taito, Namco, and Nintendo. But, as of writing this, we're in 1973. Taito and Sega are busy copying Pong, Namco is merely a distributor of Atari games in Japan, and Nintendo is barely on the map. Really, all the action is taking place in the United States.

But, as we can see from this article, and my most recent Gomoko article, that didn't stop Japan from being an influence prior to their earliest arcade hits. Developers just had to look to different source material, and they found it in the form of board games. As we saw in the Gomoko article, the earliest of the Far-Eastern board games to get the computer game treatment that we know of was Go. That was in 1968, written by Albert Lindsey Zobrist. Zobrist is an important figure in computer science, as he invented a hashing system, suitably named after him (Zobrist hashing), that is used in computerised board games like Go and Chess. We're not going to go too in depth on information relating to Go in this article, however - I'll save that for a separate Go article.

That being said, it's extremely difficult to separate the history of Go from the history of Gomoku, as the games are inextricably linked. For Gomoku is simply a variant of Go that gained a whole life unto itself after arriving in Japan. Go was created in ancient China, with sources dating it being between 2,500 and 4,000 years old! It's still being played today, which makes it one of the oldest - if not the oldest - extant board game still actively played today.

Go-Go-Gomoku

It's entirely unclear how and when Gomoku developed out of Go as a separate variant. Nobody really seems to know, from what I can tell. The best sources I could find merely suggest that the two developed alongside each other, with Gomoku - or Wuziqi, as it's known in Chinese - being a simpler game using the same board and pieces that was designed to be more easily played by children. Other sources imply that it might've actually been invented in Japan... What is clear to me is that the history of Gomoku is a complete mess.

Fortunately, the core difference in rules between Go and Gomoku is abundantly clear. Go is about territory control and capturing enemy pieces, whereas Gomoku is an alignment game - basically a larger scale version of Tic-Tac-Toe or Connect Four (and, consequently, far more interesting.) Instead of three or four in a row, Gomoku goes for five in a row. *Connect Five, if you will. The name "Gomoku" itself refers to the game's five-in-a-row alignment rule. The full name of the game is Gomoku-Narabe (五目並べ) - Go（五）meaning "five," Moku (目) meaning "item", and Narabe (並べ) meaning "line up;" literally translated "five items line up."

Back to the mess that is Gomoku's history, we now turn to how the game arrived in Japan. This isn't much clearer than the development of Gomoku out of Go. In fact, there are two dates floating around for the arrival of Go and Gomoku in Japan. Great. Reminds me of the dating for the Biblical Exodus, as we have an "early" date and a "late" date to consider. For reference, when I say Gomoku, I'm referring to both Go and Gomoku. The two don't really become separate entities in Japan until much later on. Plus, it saves me the hassle of constantly writing "Go and Gomoku" all the time.

We'll start with the early date. These sources state that Gomoku arrived in Japan via Chinese emigrants in ~270 BC. That's a damn long time ago, especially compared to the late date. In this chronology, Gomoku arrived under a different name, Kakugo (覚悟), a word that translates to "readiness." However, there's no actual evidence I could find to support this early date. One source cites a book from ~100 AD that references the game, but there's no evidence I could find of a text like that actually existing.

The far more likely-to-be-true date for the arrival of Gomoku in Japan is the late date of 754 AD. The story goes that it was brought back to Japan from China by a Japanese ambassador named Kibi no Makibi, otherwise known as Kibi Daijin (Minister Kibi). Born into a noble family, he was sent as part of an envoy to Japan in 717, staying there for 18 years, absorbing all the he could from the China of the Tang Dynasty. After returning, he was heavily involved in the governance of Japan under several emperors, before being sent back to China in 752. It was from this second trip, concluding in 754, that Kibi brought Gomoku over to Japan. It's actually from Japan where we get the name Go from, despite the game's Chinese origin. It's derived from the word igo (囲碁). The second of those Kanji is quite literally the Kanji for Go. It became such a popular game in Japan that it got its own Kanji all for itself. The Chinese name for Go is Weiqi (literally "surrounding game"), and Gomoku's Chinese name is Wuziqi ("five piece game").

Artist's rendition of Kibi no Makibi.

Before I continue on with Japan's history with Gomoku, I do want to briefly mention that it also spread to Korea, likely a century or two, at least, before it got to Japan. Go in Korea is known as Baduk, with the Gomoku variant being known as Omok ("five stones"). It was present in Korea in the 7th century AD at least, and one story purports it to have been brought to Korea by a Chinese sage contemporaneous with Confucius (5th-6th century AD). Again, there's blurring of lines here, as whether it was just Go that was brought over, or if Gomoku was included, or if Gomoku was brought to Korea from Japan at a later date... thinking about it that way turns it all into a circular mess that makes my head hurt. Moving on.

Back to Japan, we are going to be jumping ahead a bit in time to pick up the story of Gomoku.

How much is "a bit?" Oh... about a thousand years.

This is unfortunately where we really run hard into the problem I mentioned earlier about the inextricable link between Go and Gomoku. For Japan, for the next 1,000 years, Gomoku's history is Go's history. All the attention is on Go, and the first story to even mention Gomoku as its own separate entity takes place in the 18th century. That's right - no writings, no mentions, not one peep about Gomoku for a thousand years.

Breaking Free

As I don't want to dive deep into Go's history here, I'll provide a brief overview, as the context is needed to know how Gomoku got to the point of unhooking itself from Go.

For about 500 years, Go found a comfortable little niche of prestige in the halls of royalty and nobility in Japan. It became a highly regarded pastime that also became quite competitive. One story, recounted by Edward Lasker in his 1960 book Go and Go-Moku: The Oriental Board Games, tells of a Japanese prince visiting China, about 100 years after the game's introduction to Japan, for the sole purpose of challenging China's best Go players.

Eventually, around the 13th-14th century, Go managed to escape the halls of nobility, and found popularity first amongst the military classes, and then the general public. Again, nothing is said about Gomoku. Go's popularity continued to boom, though. So much so, that once the Edo period commenced under the Tokugawa Shogunate, Go academies were being created for the purpose of training players in the now-ancient and revered art of Go.

Our first story of Gomoku comes now in the 18th century, as previously mentioned. The story goes that the spread of Gomoku as a separate game from Go can be attributed to a merchant named Kuwanaya Takeemon, who was famous for his skill at the game. He was a 10th generation oil merchant who regularly visited the noble Nijo family, and it's reported that he spread the knowledge of Gomoku through his business travels.

By the end of the 19th century, Gomoku had finally attained its own identity separate from its parent game. It had a book dedicated to it, the Gomoku Jōseki Collection, dated to 1856. It also began to go global, attracting the attention of the British Empire, with the Brits writing of the game later into the century. However, they didn't call it Gomoku - they instead called it Go-Bang or Goban. Eventually it would be distributed across the West in the 20th century under the names Spoil Five and Five in a Row.

However, we've yet to address the most significant event in Gomoku's history - Renju.

Renju

As Gomoku increased in popularity over the 19th century, many efforts were undertaken to try and "balance" the game. It had been discovered that, in what is called "freestyle Gomoku" - starting with a blank board - the player going first (black) is significantly advantaged. It's at the point of being a "solved game," if you knew how to play perfectly, you would never lose. So, various starting setups and rules were experimented with to try and find a nice balance where both black and white had about an equal chance of winning.

The problem was, that this version of Gomoku didn't have a name. There were a whole bunch of names being used, and it got to the point where nobody really seemed to like any of them very much.

Enter Ruikou Kuroiwa, a journalist and founder of the Japanese newspaper, Yorozu Chouhou. He decided to take it upon himself to find a new, respectable name for Gomoku that would remove the stigma attached to the old names. What he came up with was Renju, which literally means "connected pearls." The name was announced in Yorozu Chouhou on December 6, 1899, and has stuck ever since as the name for the globally recognised, professional variant of Gomoku.

Renju began to be played competitively further across the world as the 20th century progressed. Eventually, in 1988, the Renju International Federation (RIF) was founded, for the purpose of holding world championships. The inaugural championship was held in 1989, appropriately, in Kyoto. Since 2009, the championships have been run on a biannual basis. While there are other noteworthy variants of Gomoku played all around the world, none took off quite like Renju.

Video Game Gomoku

Looking into the digital world of Gomoku, it makes for reading quite similar to Hangman, in all honesty. A good amount of action in the 70s and 80s, and dropping off in interest afterwards, with few games being produced.

The first computer Gomoku appeared in 1972 as a BASIC, text-based game, written by Greg Thagard. This rendition of Gomoku plays a 9x9 board. In 1981, it was ported to the Sol-20 microcomputer, and is still playable today. The computer is slow, taking up to a minute to decide its moves, but is competent at the game...

Thagard's Gomoku, Sol-20 port.

...unlike 1973's Gomoko, by Peter Sessions. I've already waxed lyrical at the massive failure that that game's computer opponent is, so I'll spare you the details on that here. What this game introduces as an improvement on Thagard's game is a choice of board size, from the smallest 7x7 board, up to the Go-standard 19x19 board.

Quick reminder of how incompetent Gomoko is.

1976 saw three new Gomoku programs appear. However, only one of them was actually a game. That one ran on the Intel 8080 microprocessor, and was published by RBB Software Products. No credited author is known of. As for the other two... well, those were Gomoku-playing programs that participated in computer Gomoku competitions. Yes, just like how there were computer Chess competitions, where the brainiest boffins and computer scientists tried to develop the smartest, bestest Chess-playing program they could, there were likewise those who did the same with Gomoku. One of these, developed by D. Walden, managed third place in the 1976 championship.

1979 was the year where Gomoku saw the most attention from game developers, with a whopping five games releasing that year for all the brand-spanking new microcomputers that arrived only a year or two prior. The Apple II, Atari 8-bit line, TRS-80, Altair 8800 and Commodore PET all received versions of the game.

The 1980s saw the first Renju computer game appear - this one from a Japanese developer, released for the Apple II. 1980-83 saw several more Gomoku and Renju games appear - this time not limited to home computers, but there was also an arcade game, Gomoku Narabe, released in 1982, and Gomoku Narabe Renju by Nintendo for the Famicom/NES in 1983.

Of course, Nintendo had to make an appearance.

After that, the interest in video game Gomoku fell off hard. Only one game in 1988, and a mere handful across the 1990s and 2000s. And that brings us to the state of Gomoku video games today. Mind you, it's not much of a state at all. More of a ghost town, really. The most recent Gomoku game, Let's Go Gobang was, according to MobyGames, released in 2021 as a digital download on Windows and Nintendo Switch. Nothing else in five years (at the time of writing this article.) But, there are at least a handful of browser-based versions available to freely play that a quick Google search will bring up.

Endgame

Here ends the lesson on the history of Gomoku. As you've seen, it was so deeply intertwined with Go for much of its existence that, despite the evident antiquity of Gomoku, it has little historical evidence to show for it prior to the 18th century.

But, it finally managed to break free from the shadow of Go and become a internationally-regarded, competitive board game in its own right. Especially after the invention of Renju. The most recent world championship from 2025 was fully live-streamed on YouTube, for those curious on what the state of Gomoku as a sport looks like today. They stream six games simultaneously, so it can be a little tricky to keep track of everything, but it's all there.

The troubles with the historical evidence, and working across sources in two languages made this a more difficult assignment than this series' debut article on Hangman. On the flipside, I got to learn about a whole new competitive sport that I never knew existed before. That's the beauty of doing these broader, historical articles - I always learn something new. That makes the work tremendously rewarding to do.

What's next for this series depends on whatever project I complete next. Could be Tic-Tac-Toe, could be Hexapawn, or it could be something completely different. My workflow is still in a state of flux at the moment, with all the changes going on around here. So it could be a while.

A Brief History of... Hangman

Going to try something new here. Typically, when the first video game comes out based on a real-world game or concept, I would include a short history of that game/concept within the same article. Here, I'd like to try something different and separate the history of the source from the digital interpretation.

With the Game of Hangman article having just released, the traditional pen-and-paper game of Hangman is a perfectly suitable choice to begin this little foray into the broader world of games. I'll keep the format quite simple on these: origins of the game, the earliest video game attempts, and the state of the game in current day.

Here's one I prepared earlier.

The History of Hand-Drawn Executions

While Hangman is a now-ubiquitous little game played by likely every child who ever attended school over the past 100-120 years, there's no concrete answer on where exactly the game came from. Ah, the historian's worst nightmare: obscure and uncertain origins.

There is a mythical origin story of the game floating around the internet, the origins of which I'm uncertain of. No credible sources are around to support this story, which dates back to 17th century Europe and real hangings. A prisoner would be set up on the gallows, over a five-legged stand - the legs representing the number of guesses the prisoner had at guessing a word set by their executioner before their life would be snuffed out. If the prisoner guessed the word correctly, they'd be set free. This real life practice was then somehow, somewhere, immortalised in a pen-and-paper children's game. Great fun for all the family!

More realistically, it seems that Hangman's origins can be somewhat traced back to the Victorian-era Great Britain. Variants of the game would be regularly presented in educational publications in the mid-late 19th century. One of the more commonly known early examples of a Hangman-type game comes from an 1894 book entitled The Traditional Games of England, Scotland and Ireland, compiled by Alice Bertha Gomme. The variant in this book forgoes the gallows, and is instead called Birds, Beasts and Fishes. Functionally it's very similar, but focuses on the titular animals, and makes it a little easier (it's a children's game, after all) by starting the words off with the first and last letters being given. This variant being included in a "Traditional Games" type of book suggests that word-guessing games along these lines had already been around for quite some time - my guess would be multiple generations, at least.

It made its way across the Atlantic by the start of the 20th century, as reported in an... interesting article, shall we say, published by The Philadelphia Inquirer in 1902. Just look up "White Cap Party", and you'll see what I mean. From that point onward, the game of Hangman appears to have stabilised into the form everyone knows it as today. Some have taken it upon themselves to devise less violent / implicitly racist (or so they claim) forms of the game in more recent years, but I'll save that discussion for the current-day state of the game later in this article.

Digital Dule Trees

As we already know from my Game of Hangman article, the origins of video game adaptations of Hangman date back well into the 1970s. Game of Hangman isn't the first one, however. There's at least one known game that pre-dates Ken Aupperle's take on the word-guessing game, dating back to 1970. I actually spent some time fiddling around with a PDP-10 emulator, and was able to get the game running! This version, whose author is unknown, plays like conventional Hangman, however the way it draws the gallows is opposite to convention. The picture of the hanging man begins fully drawn, with each incorrect guess (9 total) erasing a part of the picture, until it disappears entirely. Unusual, but the end result is functionally the same. The ASCII drawing of the hangman is also quite detailed - impressive for the time. Expect a full article dedicated this Hangman game in the future.

Aupperle's game in action.

Ken Aupperle's is likely the second Hangman video game. This, as we've already seen, plays by the conventional rules. Aupperle's drawing of the hangman is far less detailed, but he does come up with some very creative words to guess. I won't go into much more detail on this game, as I've already given it a full article, so check that post out to get all the details.

Skipping a few years forward over other early computer takes, it's the first generation of home computers, and second generation of home consoles where Hangman really gets its time in the video game spotlight. Just about every home computer and console had their own version of Hangman, most fairly early on in the generation's lifespan, too. This was still around the time where the home console developers were trying to pitch their devices as more than just entertainment devices - they could also be used for fun education, so they claimed. Consoles like the Atari 2600 and Fairchild Channel F heavily leaned into educational titles early on, of which Hangman was one, both consoles releasing their takes on the game in 1978. On the computer side of things, innovation took place pretty quickly, as developers on the Apple II came out with a series of multilingual Hangman games, beginning with 1978's The Spanish Hangman. Later, there would be German, French, Russian, and even Latin versions, all giving the twist of making the player translate words and even phrases from one language into another.

How... inquisitive.

The development of Hangman video games drops off quite significantly after the late 1970s - early 1980s. I would hazard a guess that this drop off is a fairly natural effect of the increasing proficiency and creativity of game developers, making Hangman not a terribly interesting type of game to make. There were still some rather curious takes on the formula, such as 1994's sci-fi Effacer: Hangman from the 25th Century, released for that most dreaded of consoles: the Philips CD-i. There were some later Flash and handheld console takes on Hangman, but interest in making Hangman video games has almost died out in the 21st century.

If this is what Hangman looks like in the 25th century,
I'm glad I won't be around to see it.

Modern Mock Trials

Hangman in all its forms continue to be played with regularity in the 21st century, yet not without controversy and the nature of our times affecting the way the game is perceived. Our sensitive-to-offense, obsessed-with-political-correctness culture in the West had led to many to rethink how to present Hangman without the perceived sinister undertones present in its original form. On one hand, this does make sense, as having a children's game feature an antiquated form of capital punishment is maybe not the best idea in the world. One could argue this mindset has been present since Gomme's Traditional Games book, with that variant entirely removing the gallows. Modern attempts to "clean up" the game feature a different kind of drawing being made, like a snowman, or other various activities not involving death. In the complete opposite direction, our culture also seems to love death and the grotesque, so attempts have been made to make Hangman even more violent, like in the case of the 2007 flash game Hangman Extreme.

Just in case you though regular Hangman was a bit dull,
Hangman Extreme has you covered.

On the other hand, this obsession with "cleaning up" Hangman's image can go to far into the realms of historical anachronism. One blog I read during my research equated the premise of Hangman with a lynching of all things. My professional opinion on this is that I can see how that association could be made by certain quarters of the United States. Although, I think that the historical evidence would prove without a shadow of a doubt that Hangman is a game definitely not about that hideous and awful practice. First, the game originated in Britain, not America, where the practice was totally foreign. Secondly - if the mythical origins of Hangman are to be believed - the game had a purpose completely dissociated from 19th to early 20th century American culture. People can repurpose things for nefarious purposes all the time - but that doesn't mean that the thing itself is inherently immoral. 

My personal opinion is that it's literally a game about guessing words, for crying out loud. Get over yourself. There's no big conspiracy here.

To utilise Ockham's Razor here, the simplest explanation for the origin of Hangman is likely that it comes from a time where public executions by hanging were a normal part of life, and that always weaves itself into the culture of the day. The image of hanging probably got worked into educational exercises as a familiar visual aid for students. It doesn't mean that it was a bad or good thing, that's what the culture was like at the time Hangman likely originated.

Any Last Words?

Just to quickly follow on from the last paragraph, and to provide some perspective. My job, as a historian, is simply to find out the facts and present them within the context of the culture in which they originated, while correcting any misconceptions that inevitably come from our temporal displacement from said culture. The historian isn't here to be a sort of "morality police," or to tell you, "people in the past were savages, weren't they?" Even our culture and generation has its own vices that future generations will call us savages for. We should never think that we're the generation that's "made it." Else we risk the folly of repeating the errors our forefathers made.

On a more personal note - for what it's worth, Hangman is a game I played regularly through school, and I thought nothing of it. It was just a game, and a fun one when you're in primary (elementary) school. Whether I knew what hanging was a concept at the time, I can't remember. But I don't think it matters. It didn't affect my perception of life, that I know for sure.

If you happen to be a teacher or educator reading this, and the very concept of Hangman still bothers you - change it. You are free to switch it out with something else. I've no right to judge. All I want us to know is the proper historical context.

Next up: Cathode Ray Tube Amusement Device.