Rubik's Cube 3-D

Unreleased prototype.

Programmer Peter Niday was working as a tester at Atari's labs when he decided to develop a 3-D Rubik's Cube game in his spare time. Atari managers eventually saw his little project and Niday was then promoted to a full-fledged programmer a short time later. However, instead of finishing up his 3-D experiment, Atari threw him onto the higher priority Sorcerers Apprentice project instead. Atari still had plans on releasing the game, but only as a two-fer with another Rubik's Cube inspired game called Atari Video Cube. However, in the end marketing decided that it was easier to just release one of the games and Atari Video Cube was chosen over Rubik's Cube 3-D. This was most likely due to Atari Video Cube offering a bit more action than the pure puzzle nature of Rubik's Cube 3-D.

Due to the strange nature of this 'cheat mode', people have begun to speculate it may have been put in for debugging purposes. It is unknown if it would have been included in the final release. It appears that Atari may have been reconsidering releasing Rubik's Cube 3-D as a standalone cart due to them owning the license to the Rubik's name, but later decided to simply rename Atari Video Cube into Rubik's Cube instead.