After Solitile sold well for Everett Kaser and Snarf didn't, he sat down to
figure out what made Solitile so much fun to play.  He decided it was the
puzzle aspects of the game and, as he put it, the "constant but un-frenzied
clicking on different visual aspects of the game."

So he sat down to think of a follow-up game to Solitile that would recapture
that kind of atmosphere.  Ideas were sketched down on paper and discarded.
During this process, he remembered the classic "Who Owns the Zebra?" game
that he first saw in high school and, later, from a co-worker in the
mid-eighties.  This game became his inspiration; for five months in early
1991, he designed and implemented what would become one of the two most
successful Everett Kaser Software games (the other being Solitile) and his
personal favorite.  For the first two thirds of its development, it was
called "Loginx" and was then changed to "Sherlock."  The classic "Who Owns
the Zebra?" puzzle is shown in the Sherlock for Windows help file.