Who invented Othello?

The honest answer has two halves. One man made the game people play today. Two other men, ninety years earlier, made the game he started from, and spent their time calling each other liars about it.

The Victorian half: two claims, no winner

In 1883 in England, Lewis Waterman and John W. Mollett each said Reversi was theirs. Each denounced the other as a fraud in print. No court, no patent office and no historian since has settled it. If a page tells you confidently that Waterman invented Reversi, it is taking a side in a quarrel that ended without a verdict.

What can be pinned down is when the game was definitely in circulation. The Saturday Review of 21 August 1886 carries the first mention that historians treat as reliable. By 1893 the German publisher Ravensburger was producing Reversi as one of its earliest titles.

There is also a persistent story that Mollett had published a close relative called The Game of Annexation around 1870. The World Othello Federation's own history pages carry the claim. It is plausible and widely repeated, but it is not well documented, so this site reports it as a claim rather than a fact.

The Japanese half: what Hasegawa actually did

Goro Hasegawa was born in Mito, Ibaraki Prefecture, in 1932. Around 1949, as a school student, he was playing a flipping game with Go stones. Over the following two decades he refined it, and in 1971 he registered it in Japan under the name Othello.

The changes he made are small on paper and large in practice.

• A fixed opening. Victorian Reversi began with an empty board, and the players dropped their first two discs into the middle four squares in any arrangement they liked. Othello puts white on d4 and e5 and black on d5 and e4, every game, before anyone moves.
• A fixed first player. Black always moves first.
• A fixed disc supply. Each player gets exactly 32 discs, and the game ends if someone runs out.
• A double sided disc. One green board, 64 identical discs black on one face and white on the other. Turning a disc over is the whole game, and the physical object says so.

The first two of those are what made competitive play possible. If every game starts from the same position, openings can be named, studied and argued about, and results can be compared. The board below is a legal Victorian start and an impossible Othello one.

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Did he invent it, or improve it?

This is where care is needed, and where most pages simply pick a story.

Early on, Hasegawa described Othello as an improvement on Reversi. Later in his life he presented it as his own invention, and the account of how it came about shifted. English Wikipedia records that change directly. Meanwhile the core rule, that a disc placed at the end of a trapped line flips everything between, is unchanged from the 1880s.

The description that survives contact with the evidence is this: Hasegawa did not invent the flipping game, and he did create the game that is actually played. Standardising an opening, fixing the disc count, designing the object, founding the Japan Othello Association in March 1973, running a national championship on 4 April 1973 and getting the product into shops later that month is not a rebranding. It is the work that turned a Victorian curiosity into a game with a world championship.

Why the name Othello

Shakespeare's play turns on a black Moorish general in a white Venetian world, and on a relationship reversed by an outsider's interference. A board where black becomes white and white becomes black, move after move, is an easy fit. There is no deeper mapping between the play and the rules, and looking for one is a waste of a good evening.

Who owns it now

The Victorian game is in the public domain. Anyone can publish Reversi, write an engine for it or teach it. The name Othello is a live registered trademark held by MegaHouse Corporation, a Bandai Namco company, which inherited it through Tsukuda Original's successor. Ravensburger has distributed the official set in the United States and Canada since August 2024.

That split is why the same game shows up under two names, and why a free site like this one uses the older one. Nothing about the rules differs.

Sources

• Reversi on Wikipedia, for the 1883 claims, the 1886 mention, the 1893 Ravensburger edition and the 1973 launch.
• Goro Hasegawa on Wikipedia, for his dates and the shift in his account.
• World Othello Federation, Othello pre-history, for the Annexation claim.

Next: a fuller profile of Goro Hasegawa, the complete history of the game, or the rule by rule comparison. If you would rather stop reading and start playing, the board is on the front page.