Tokyo (CNN) – Japanese toy maker MegaHouse has unveiled a miniature Rubik’s Cube, so tiny you’ll need tweezers to solve it.
Each face of the cube, made of aluminum, measures about five millimeters in diameter. It went on sale on Thursday on the manufacturer’s website and is expected to be delivered next April.
“The 5-millimeter Rubik’s Cube is the result of the trinity of machines, cutting tools and the passion of the players,” said Kiyokazu Saito, president of Iriso Precision, the company in charge of precision cutting, in a video promotional posted on the toy manufacturer’s website.
Weighing just 0.3 grams (about 0.01 ounces), the puzzle measures about one-thousandth the size of the original, about 5.5 cm (2.2 inches) on each side. And each side of the nine squares on the device’s six faces measures just 1.6 millimeters (about 0.06 inches).
MegaHouse told CNN that the company began conceptualizing it four years ago and began the process to produce it in 2022.
In August, the Guinness World Record confirmed that the microcube was the world’s smallest rotating puzzle.
The miniature model broke the record set by British puzzle designer Tony Fisher in 2016, when he surprised fans with a 5.6 millimeter version.
But the price suggests that it will probably be more of a collector’s item than the kind of cube that gamers will entertain themselves with anywhere.
They retail for 777,777 yen ($5,320) and each comes with a base declaring it the “World Record Smallest Rubik’s Cube.”
The launch coincides with the 50th anniversary of the rotating puzzle, which counts hobbyists and professional mathematicians among its huge fans. More than 500 million cubes have been sold since Hungarian inventor Ernő Rubik created it in 1974.
Every year tournaments are held around the world, in which participants compete for the title of the fastest puzzle solver in fractions of a second.
The current record holder for a standard 3x3x3 cube is Korean-American Max Park22, who solved the Rubik’s Cube in 3.13 seconds in a competition in Long Beach, California, last year, followed by China’s Wang Yiheng, 10, who achieved a personal best of 3.38 second in a competition held in their country in August, according to the World Cube Association.
The standard 3x3x3 category, one of the most competitive in the Rubik’s Cube community, is currently dominated by the two countries, with Luke Garrett and Aaron Huynh of the USA in third and fourth place, respectively, and Du Yusheng , from China, in fifth.
