Rubik's Cube
3-D combination puzzle with many different permutations
The Rubik's Cube (Hungarian: Rubik-kocka) is a 3D combination puzzle invented in 1974 by Hungarian sculptor and professor of architecture Ernő Rubik. Originally called the Magic Cube (Hungarian: bűvös kocka), the puzzle was licensed by Rubik to be sold by Pentangle Puzzles in the UK in 1978, and then by Ideal Toy Corp in 1980 via businessman Tibor Laczi and Seven Towns founder Tom Kremer. The cube was released internationally in 1980 and became one of the most recognised icons in popular culture. It won the 1980 German Game of the Year special award for Best Puzzle. As of January 2024, around 500 million cubes had been sold worldwide, making it the world's bestselling puzzle game and bestselling toy. The Rubik's Cube was inducted into the US National Toy Hall of Fame in 2014.
On the original, classic Rubik's Cube, each of the six faces was covered by nine stickers, with each face in one of six solid colours: white, red, blue, orange, green and yellow. Some later versions of the cube have been updated to use coloured plastic panels instead. Since 1988, the arrangement of colours has been standardised, with white opposite yellow, blue opposite green and orange opposite red, and with the red, white and blue arranged clockwise, in that order. On early cubes, the position of the colours varied from cube to cube.
The public source identifies “Rubik's Cube” as 3-D combination puzzle with many different permutations. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Rubik's, Cube and combination.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 21, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q47043. The Library of Congress control number is sh85115690. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1974, 1978, 1980 and 2024.
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This entry incorporates text from “Rubik's Cube” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.