How do You Solve a Problem Like the Cube?

Created as a piece of art, smuggled out of communist Hungary and sold as a toy for children, the Rubik's cube is one of the most engaging artifacts of contemporary pop culture. 

With a simple, yet complex, six-sided design of fifty-four squared coloured tiles, the cube is anything but a child's toy. It is a portable mystery that can baffle adults and take hours to solve. It is the pop puzzle that continues to delight over 25 years after it was first introduced to the world.

Ernő Rubik, a Hungarian sculptor, created the cube in 1974. Rubik made his first prototype out of wood. The original cube was a much heavier and far less colourful version of the cube we have all grown to love. It was coined the 'magic cube' and patented in 1975.

By 1979 Rubik's puzzle was a hit in Budapest, but the cube was destined for a bigger stage. A friend managed to get one out of the country and brought it to the Nuremberg Toy Fair. Here the cube landed in the hands of Tom Kremer, a toy specialist who immediately saw the toy's potential as a mathematical puzzle for people around the world. After acquiring the rights to distribute it, the cube was renamed the Rubik's Cube, after its original inventor.

In three years, Kremer's toy company sold over 300 cubes, as the world fell in love with the handheld puzzle. It is now the world's best-selling toy. It is also a symbol of the inherent human desire to solve the mysteries that are placed before us.

As makers of puzzles, the Krakit team admires Rubik's pioneering spirit. It takes a special person to create such a tangible riddle, a riddle that has touched the hands of one in every seven people on this planet. Crazy….

Our escape games are slightly less ambitious, but they do offer a similar intellectual challenge. Try your hand at one of our theme rooms this week and relive the delightful innocence of solving a puzzle.