Blog
Rubik's cubes: more than a momentary whim
January 9, 2019
It’s the toy which summed up the 80s. Sure there was the Slinky, the Game Boy, and the Atari, but nothing quite equalled the unrivalled joy – and accompanying frustration – of the Rubik’s Cube. The creation of Hungarian sculptor and architecture professor Erno Rubik, nearly 400 million Rubik’s Cubes have been sold since its launch and, according to the New York Post, one in every seven people on the planet have – at one time or another – tried to solve it. The operative word being solve; remember taking all those stickers off and painstakingly replacing them in a last-ditch effort?
For most of us, of course, it was a delightful diversion: something we could pick up and put down and throw against the wall in frustration. But there were enough hardcore fans (clicking away under their anoraks at bus stops and in schoolyards) to turn this toy into much more than a momentary whim: competitions were launched and, over the years, it became Big Business.
Today, sites such as Twitch stream cubing events to hundreds of thousands of spectators all over the world. And while tuning in to see people less than half your age snap away at the record (at the time of going to press, 23-year-old Australian Feliks Zemdegs holds the record for a Rubik’s Cube with a blistering 4.22 seconds!) may be mesmerising, it’s not nearly as exciting as seeing the whole thing happen live. Which is where Cyprus comes in…