Logical Games

Although the Rubik’s Cube™ rose to fame following its introduction to the United States by the Ideal Toy Company (the very same company which introduced the Teddy Bear), it was not Ideal which originally imported and distrubuted the toy. No, instead that credit goes to Béla J. Szalai, a humble businessman and Hungarian native.

In August of 1978, Mr. Szalai travelled to the Hungarian capital of Budapest to visit his relatives. It was there and on that visit that he first discovered the Hungarian Magic Cube, the precursor to today’s Rubik’s Cube™.^[1]

By that time, the Magic Cube, or Bűvös Kocka as it was called in Hungarian, had achieved modest success and had been circulating in Hungary and some parts of Europe for about eight months. When Mr. Szalai came across it, he instantly recognized its potential and on September 13, 1978 ordered 1,000 units directly from the Cube’s manufacturer, Politechnika Ipari Szövetkezet.^[1:1]

The Magic Cube!

Upon receipt of the cubes in March of 1979, Logical Games, Inc., the company Mr. Szalai formed to distribute them, immediately began sales in the United States. It was in this moment that Mr. Szalai had become the first person to market and sell the toy within the U.S. He named this toy The Magic Cube!

In August or September, Mr. Szalai placed another order for an additional 2,000 puzzles from Konsumex, the Hungarian state exporter and the exclusive wholesaler of the Cube.^[1:2] At that time, he also made an inquiry to Konsumex about the possibility of acquiring the exclusive rights to the Magic Cube. Konsumex placed a price of USD $1 million on that right, which Mr. Szalai deemed too high and ceased any further inquiries along that line.^[1:3]

Mr. Szalai operated his business and sold the Magic Cube via mail order from his personal residence in Haymarket, Virginia, where he charged wholesale prices for orders of twelve or more at USD $6 each plus shipping.^[2] It was also around this time that he filed to trademark The Magic Cube!, though it wouldn’t be approved until April 24, 1984.

The primary marketing technique employed by Logical Games was to simply write letters of solicitation to prospective vendors. Logical Games had also never advertised the Cube on television, and just one paid advertisement was placed in a September 1979 issue of a magazine which had a readership of approximately 32,200. There was also a free promotion in a magazine issue for November or December 1979 which was circulated to about 576,000 readers.^[1:4]

Despite very little concentration on advertising, Logical Games did achieve modest sales, and by February of 1980, all 3,000 puzzles had been disposed of in the United States. It was at this point that Mr. Szalai, having already rejected Konsumex’s offer to buy the exclusive rights to the cubes, decided to begin manufacturing the puzzles himself.

Manufacturing

Mr. Szalai mentioned during an informal interview that he had taken out a second mortgage on his home to pay for plastic injection molds that would be used to manufacture the component parts of the Cube.^[2:1] Notably, on close inspection the Cubes that came from these molds are identical to the earliest of those produced in Hungary by Politechnika—even including the same patterns of surface imperfections.

It’s worth noting that at some point in 1978, Politechnika had begun using new molds which produced lighter, more streamlined cubes^[3]. Unlike earlier models, these cubes turned much more smoothly and the components were hollow rather than being made of solid plastic. This new generation of cubes were an average of 20% (approximately 28 grams) lighter than their earlier counterparts. Thus, it is concievable that, especially considering how unbelievably similar Politechnika’s cubes were to his own, Mr. Szalai purchased Politechnika’s old molds, as having new molds produced for him would have certainly come at great expense.

The cubes Mr. Szalai produced, however, had one key difference: the majority of the pieces were molded from white plastic, rather than black.

Mr. Szalai used white plastic because he wagered that, instead of using colored stickers, it might be possible to print the colors onto the cube directly via pad printing (also known as tampoprinting)—the same process used to print the labels on shampoo bottles.^[2:2] If all went well, Mr. Szalai planned to begin producing cubes with printed colors within a month, but no such cubes produced by Logical Games appear to have ever materialized.^[2:3]

Why did Logical Games never produce cubes with printed stickers? Politechnika is known to have experimented with printing the colored labels on their cubes around 1980, but a short time after units with printed stickers were distributed and sold to consumers it was discovered that the the pigment for the orange labels dissolved the black plastic resulting in a deep purple color instead.^[4] It is possible that Mr. Szalai may have caught wind of this potential flaw and pursued it no further.

According to Mr. Szalai, manufacturing the Cube was very labor intensive and that about 4% of cubes were rejected due to mechanical reasons. He said that he and his family all participated in the production of the cubes, and each unit would take about 16 minutes to assemble at full speed: 4 minutes to tap in and glue the internal caps for the full 20 edge and corner pieces; 1 minute to attach five of the six center pieces to the core using screws and springs; 1 minute to put the cube together and screw in the final center piece; 4 minutes to apply silicon grease to the cube’s interior, tighten all the screws evenly, test out the cube’s rotation, and tap in and glue the six center piece caps over top of the screws; and finally, 6 minutes to apply the stickers.^[2:4]

After assembling several thousand cubes, Mr. Szalai recalled that he became so accustomed to the movements that he could even read while performing final steps of assembly.^[2:5]

In 1980, after having celebrated two years of modest success, Mr. Szalai’s The Magic Cube! would soon be dominated by Rubik’s Cube™, the same toy marketed under a different name and brought to the United States by the company which had invented the Teddy Bear about 80 years prior: the Ideal Toy Company. Not only would Mr. Szalai’s toy be buried by Rubik’s Cube’s™ success, Ideal Toy would also take them to court alleging trademark infringement among other claims.

Ideal Toy v. Logical Games

A month or two after Mr. Szalai declined Konsumex’s offer to purchase the exclusive worldwide distribution rights to the Magic Cube, the same offer was proposed to the Ideal Toy Company. Unlike Mr. Szalai, however, Ideal Toy pursued the deal, and at the end of September 1979 a contract had been signed.^[3:1]

The following year, the Cube was introduced to the United States alongside an aggressive marketing campaign. It very quickly became a worldwide sensation, and when the Cube’s popularity peaked at the start of 1981, Ideal Toy struggled to supply enough cubes to satisfy demand. As a result, the market was flooded with cheap imitations from East Asia.^[3:2]

On November 17, 1981, in response to the surge in knock-off cubes entering the market, Ideal Toy filed a complaint with the United States International Trade Commission. The complaint named over 100 respondents and alleged numerous violations of section 337 under the Tariff Act of 1930 (19 U.S.C. § 1337).^[1:5]

Two years later, in January of 1983, the Trade Commission finally published their investigative report on the issue titled In the Matter of Certain Cube Puzzles (No. 3337-TA-112). This report definitively settles and discusses at length the exclusive trademark rights Ideal Toy (and it’s successor by acquisition, CBS, Inc.) have to the Cube, why said trademark is legitimate, and relevant legal cases regarding the matter. ^[1:6]

One such case cited in the Trade Commission’s report was between Ideal Toy and Logical Games. This suit was one of a several brought by Ideal after filing the complaint with the Trade Comission. In the suit, which was argued in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, Ideal alleged that Logical Games had infringed on its trademark, unfairly copied its trade dress (i.e. the toy’s appearance), and common law unfair competition under Virginia Law.^[1:7]

It was in this suit that Ideal Toy first claimed that cubes with "other background colors” (i.e. the color of the plastic underneath the colored labels) infringed on their trademarks. The court accepted this argument, and Logical Games, which manufactured cubes using white rather than black plastic, was thus still judged to be manufacturing cubes which unfairly copied Ideal Toy’s trade dress.^[1:8]

During the case, it was also revealed that in some production runs Logical Games used light blue stickers in place of white stickers, but the district court did not believe that this slight change in color alone was substantial enough to eliminate the confusing similarity between it and Ideal Toy’s Rubik’s Cube™.^[1:9]

On the matter of trademark infringement, the district court ruled that, since Logical Games did not explicitly acquire the rights to the Cube from either Konsumex or Politechnika, even if Logical Games obtained any rights to the Cube as a result of “first use” within the United States, those rights still “flow back” to the Hungarian companies from which the rights originated: Konsumex and Politechnika. Thus, any rights that Logical Games may have had were consequently owned by their competitor, Ideal Toy, and Logical Games was therefore in violation of Ideal Toy’s trademark.^[1:10]

The report supports this ruling by stating “there is a presumption that in the absence of express or implied acknowledgment or transfer by the foreign manufacturer of rights in the United States, all rights to the trademark are in the foreign manufacturer.”^[1:11]

Although the district court’s ruling was appealed by Logical Games to the U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals in 1983, the district court’s ruling was affirmed, and an attempt by Logical Games to obtain a rehearing a month later was denied.^[1:12]

This was the final nail in the coffin for Logical Games. There is no question that Logical Games was the first company to distribute the Hungarian Magic Cube in the United States, but the fact remains that Logical Games simply did not have any exclusive right to do so. That right was transferred to and was owned solely by Ideal Toy. Thus, Logical Games had no choice but to cease further manufacturing and sales of their cube puzzle.

Mr. Szalai’s venture to distribute the Magic Cube in the United States had come to an end.

Rarity

Today, cubes distributed by Logical Games, Inc. are quite hard to come by. By May of 1980, Logical Games was only able to distribute somewhere in the range of 25,000 to 30,000 cubes within the United States,^[1:13] the bulk of which were manufactured by Mr. Szalai and his family. Although certainly not an insignificant amount, the number pales in comparison to the hundreds of millions of those sold by Ideal Toy, not to mention the knock-offs that flooded the market.

The most common cubes produced by Logical Games found for sale are those white in color and manufactured in the U.S. Even though these are the most common variant produced by Logical Games, they are still exceptionally hard to find today.

Logical Games also distributed a several thousand cubes that were black in color: the 3,000 that were imported directly from Hungary in 1978, and then purportedly some manufactured by Logical Games not long after. In the absence of packaging, these two can be extremely difficult to distinguish, if not impossible. Though, the stickers applied by Logical Games on cubes manufactured in the U.S. tend to be slightly different shades and a bit less glossy in appearance than those used by Politechnika.

However, if accompanied by their original packaging, identification is made much easier: those imported from Hungary by Mr. Szalai will have packaging that notes “Made in Hungary,” and those manufactured by Logical Games in the United States will have packaging that notes “Made in U.S.A.”

It’s not precisely known how many black cubes were manufactured in the United States by Logical Games, but any cube with black plastic distributed by Logical Games must be exceedingly rare. For comparison, the first 17,000 or so Magic Cubes produced by Politechnika are exceedingly difficult to find today, and are very likely less rare than black cubes distributed by Logical Games.

However, as was revealed in the district court case, Logical Games had reportedly manufactured “some” cubes using light blue plastic rather than white. Although it’s unclear how many of these light blue cubes were produced, it does not appear that these cube were ever known by collectors to have existed. Likely only very few of these were ever manufactured, and by this author’s judgment may be as rare or even rarer than the black cubes distributed by Logical Games.

Questions

Questions for Mr. Szalai:

1. Were you born in the U.S. or Hungary?
2. What was your job prior to the Logical Games venture? What about after?
3. How exactly did you discover the cube in Hungary? Did you see it in a shop? Waere you introduced to it by friends or family?
4. Did you purchase Politechnikas old molds?
5. Do you still have the molds you used to produce cubes?
6. Did Logical Games ever manufacture black cubes? Or were all cubes that Logical Games produced made from white plastic?
7. Did Logical Games ever experiment with any other plastic colors? Were these ever sold? How many were produced?
8. I understand that you originally used white plastic so that you could pad print the colored labels onto the cubes. As far as I can tell, no cubes with printed stickers were ever produced. Why was this abandoned?
9. Did you have a standard arrangement of the colors that you always stickered the cubes Logical Games produced? Was it random?
10. Do you still have any of the original correspondence with Politechnika, Konsumex, and David Singmaster?
11. Do you still have any unsold cubes?

References