Memories of the '80s - The Rubik's Cube

It was the spring of 1980, the decade only a few months old. And if you were in a toy store you may have noticed a curious object chained to a display case. Next to it would have been a television screen playing a pre-recorded video tape set in a loop that continuously played the same commercial over and over again. The commercial described the toy as a puzzle called the Rubik's Cube, and promised that once you picked it up it would be impossible to put down. According to this commercial even Sir Isaac Newton was unable to solve the cube. The cube could be twisted along three axises, with two twist points on each axis breaking the cube up into 54 squares. Each side was a solid color, but by twisting and turning the cube you could mix the colors up so that each side had squares of different colors. That was the easy part. The hard part was figuring out how to restore the cube to six sides of single colors. Inevitably the sample cube chained to the display had already been mixed up. so you picked it up and tried to solve it yourself and got nowhere.

Ideal Toys knew what it was doing when it over hyped it's new acquisition, following the in-store displays with a bombardment of television commercials. By Christmas the Cube had become so popular that it rivaled the Atari 2600 in sales. This was a bit unusual considering that at the time the United States was in the thick of the Cold War and rejecting anything communist, not fully realizing that the inventor of the cube, Erno Rubik, was himself a professor living in communist Hungary. In fact Ideal did not actually manufacture the cube but imported them from the Hungarian factory. In the months following the celebrated Miracle on Ice where the United States defeated Russia in Olympics Hockey here was our country going mad over a communist puzzle. And the mania went far beyond selling the toy in stores. At it's peak the Rubik's Cube was the most bootlegged toy in history as the market was flooded with millions of illegal patent violating knockoffs. There was even a Saturday Morning cartoon on ABC called Rubik, The Amazing Cube about a magic talking Rubik's Cube with an annoying voice and creepy looking face that was in the possession of some children who were keeping it away from it's former owner, an evil magician.

Dozens of best selling books were written discussing how to solve the Cube. And sure enough millions of Americans bought the puzzle but never had a clue as to how to solve it. Some never even solved a single side, assuming they had but on closer inspection not even getting the corners right ( as they also had to be of a single color.) There was actually three ways to solve the Rubik's Cube. You could peel the decals off the Cube and put them back on with one color per side, something I would not advise as they did not stick as well once removed and tended to fall off. You could pry the Cube apart and then snap the pieces back together in the correct order. Or you could take the third option and solve it the way Erno meant it to be solved, by twisting the puzzle. The way to solve it was by using a system of twists that arranged the corners in the correct positions, then working on the middle squares. Once the different formulas were memorized solving a cube became so easy that the sport of speedcubing where competitors raced to see who could solve the Cube first. Cubes in this competition were usually solved within a minute, and the speed record as recorded by Guinness was 22 seconds.

Since you can not have a success without the inevitable imitations, the Rubik's Cube soon spawned a whole genre of puzzles. Rubik himself attempted to invent another puzzle. Although the cube had not been released in the United States until the 80s it had actually been around since 1974. Rubik's follow up invention was called Rubik's Snake which was more of a toy than an actual puzzle. The Snake was actually several triangular shaped plastic pieces hinged together so they all could independently be twisted. The challenge was to twist the snake into different shapes, such as recreating a ball or something shaped like a bird. Rubik would try to invent other puzzles including Rubik's Clock and an odd pyramid like puzzle called Rubik's Triamid, both which were barely noticed. What did get noticed was Rubik's Revenge, a cube with 16 squares instead of 9. Other toy manufacturers would release the 25 squares Professor's Cube and the 36 squares V-Cube. On the other extreme, the much smaller Pocket Cube only had four squares per side. Tomy released their own answer to the Rubik's Cube called The Pyraminx, a triangle shaped puzzle that worked much like the Rubik's Cube. And if you knew how to solve the Cube then solving the Pyraminx was a snap. Impossiball was a round version of the Rubik's Cube and despite being a different shape wound end up having the same solution to solving it. The Megaminx was a Dodecahedron shaped puzzle with 11 parts per side of different shapes. Alexander's Star was an odd shaped structure that was nearly the same as the Megaminx but with raised star shapes. And then there was The Skewb, a cube with the axis at odd angles, and Skewb's Diamond which was a six sided puzzle in the shape of a diamond.

Puzzles like the Rubik's Cube needed to be perfect shapes called Pythagorean Solids. These are shapes with identical sides which is necessary for being able to turn the pieces. Pythagoras proved thousands of years ago that only five of these solids existed, the cube which had six square sides, the Tetrahedron which was a four sided pyramid made up of four identical triangles, the Octahedron which was shaped like a diamond or two pyramids back to back and was made from eight identical triangles, the Icosahedron which was nearly roundish and made from 20 identical triangles, and the roundish Dodecahedron made from twelve pentagons. Since only five of these shapes exist this limited the number of puzzles that could be derived from the Rubik's Cube. Some inventive variations such as the Skewb which also used the cube shape changed the axis where the cube was turned, and others simply added more turning parts ( such as the V-Cube which had 25 squares ) but the more parts the easier the shape fell apart while turning it. A ball was used as a sixth solid, but was basically the same as the Rubik's Cube but only round. Ultimately what brought the 80s puzzle craze to an end was this limit and the inability for toy manufacturers to create new puzzles after the six shapes were used up. This did not stop some toy companies from trying other puzzles that went beyond twistable shapes. The Missing Link was a rectangle box that had slidable panels ( up to four per side ) and two axises at it's top and bottom. The goal was to slide the panels around so that each side was one color and formed a picture of two to three linked oval rings. Whip It was an identical puzzle but only shaped like a tube. It had three axises, and instead of linking rings was mono colored panels. While Whip It had six sides rather than The Missing Link's four sides it still turned out to be a far easier puzzle to solve, so easy that most people solved it in the store and never bothered to buy it afterwards. Probably the most daunting puzzle was called The Orb, a ball with four rows of rings that had movable beads and two an axis that allowed the top rows to combine with the middle rows. Once mixed up the puzzle seemed impossible to solve, and subsequently very few have claimed to have completed the puzzle. The solution was actually pretty simple and has recently been posted on Youtube.

But there was even a limit to how many movable panel or bead puzzles could exist. With no possibility of making puzzles similar to the Rubik's Cube toy manufacturers gave up on mass releasing puzzles, and the hype died down. In the final stages these puzzles were miniaturized and put onto key chains. While sales of the Rubik's Cube and other puzzles dropped off there were enough sales after the craze to continue to manufacture the product. But media wise the puzzle craze dropped off the face of the Earth by the mid 80s. Erno Rubik made a comeback in the 90's with the invention of Rubik's Magic, a flat puzzle with panels that could be flipped with the goal of linking rings. The actual challenge was for the person trying to solve the puzzle to figure out that they were going for a square shape rather than a letterboxed shaped solution to the puzzle, and once that was figured out it was too easy to solve. Rubik's Magic quickly became a dud after a much hyped launch. Recently Erno has released a new puzzle called Rubik's 360, a transparent globe puzzle with interior moving parts. It is too early to tell how successful this puzzle will be.