In honour of the 40th anniversary of Rubik’s cubes in Japan, the toy manufacturer Bandai corpo==ration has created the world’s smallest Rubik’s cube. The minuscule version will be available in December, but orders are being placed now.
Despite its tiny size, the cube comes with a massive price tag—the 9.9 x 9.9mm cube that weighs just 2 grams sets you back a whopping ¥198,000 (approximately $1,900 USD or £1,500 GBP). This minute version of the classic puzzle that we all love is fully functioning, and its size only adds to the challenge of solving it.
When the original cube hit the shelves in the 1980s in the US, the first two years saw more than 100 million being sold, and in Japan, 4 million cubes were snapped up in the first eight months of its release.
Though the above video is in Japanese, it is evident that this new size adds a new level of difficulty to the original Hungarian architecture professor that the cube is named after, Ernö Rubik.
Though the beloved founder of the puzzle has yet to comment on its newest evolution, he has published memoirs on his success, the most recent one being published this month. Cubed: The Puzzle of Us All details the history and personal tale of how Rubik garnered huge success, the inspiration behind the cube and how it continues to inspire his outlook on life.
In one of his more recent interviews, the inventor was asked how long he took to solve his own creation, with the world record being 3.47 seconds in 2018. Though Rubik confessed that he could not beat the world record, the 76-year-old can still solve it in around a minute.
The cube for Rubik is more than just a puzzle, for him, the cube gives him “hope that in the end, people are clever enough to solve their problems and survive.” Though this sense of hope and curiosity can be fostered without the help of a tiny Rubik’s cube with a £1,500 price tag, it is perhaps an outlook and philosophy that many of us have not considered embodying while solving this classic pastime.
If you liked reading about that and want to learn a little more about other new reiterations of your favourite childhood icons/toys, you’ll like this one here.
