The title of the Most Fascinating And Frustrating Toy must surely go to Rubik’s Cube. Nobody knows if Mr. Rubik was wronged by the world somehow and created this diabolical cube in wrathful retribution. It is a strong possibility.

Ernö Rubik was a Hungarian sculptor and professor of architecture who invented his first color-coded cube in the mid-1970s but it wasn’t until Ideal released it in the U.S. that Rubik’s Cube became a sensation. The cube had a 3x3x3 configuration of smaller squares on each side and all six sides featured a different color. Any row or column could be rotated in any direction to mix up the colors. The goal was to return all six sides to their original uniformity of color.

The puzzle was fiendishly hard for many people. Those gifted with mathematical and spatial abilities were quickly distinguished from the rank and file who, after a few hours, days, weeks or months banged their cubes against the wall in impotent rage. The lucky ones could look forward to a finished puzzle but the country was awash in people who had completed two or three sides and stalled on the rest, despairing of a solution. Soon, a sneaky mind found that the color stickers on a Rubik’s Cube could be removed and then replaced in the desired order and if that was done carefully enough, they earned boasting rights over their friends. The cube could also be dismantled and put back together in the correct order, thus bypassing the whole embarrassing wall-banging phase.

For those who didn’t cheat (surely, a mere handful), Rubik’s Cube was more than a fad; it was an obsession. Long hours were devoted to the solution; marriages ended, children went hungry, pets remained unwalked. The puzzle was so popular that competitions were organized to discover the fastest solver, the cube master. The Rubik’s Cube World Championship took place in 1982 in Budapest, Hungary where a 16-year old American solved the cube in less than 23 seconds. Prodigy, you say? Yea, verily.

Rubik’s Cubes appeared in other configurations such as the 2x2x2 Pocket Cube and the 4x4x4 Rubik’s Revenge. There were even tiny keychain Rubik’s Cubes for those people with a really deep masochistic streak. Other than toys, the cube phenomenon gave rise to a cartoon, a musical (!), an addicts’ support group and two medical conditions. The fervor for Rubik’s puzzles diminished over the years but the original cube remains popular to this day.