By Agence France-Presse

BUDAPEST–Japan’s Yu Nakajima won the Rubik’s Cube World Championships on Sunday in Budapest, the birthplace of the cult puzzle.

Nakajima averaged 12.46 seconds in arranging the six different colors of the six-sided classic 3×3 cube, which has nine panels on each side to arrange.

He beat Andrew Kang of the United States and Mitsuki Gunji, a fellow Japanese national.

But Frenchman Thibaut Jacquinot still holds the world record of 9.86 seconds in the classic 3×3 event, which he set last May.

Hometown favourite Matyas Kuti, 14, set a world record in the larger 5×5 cube competition with an average time of 1:45:07. Kuti also won in two other categories.

Anssi Vanhala of Finland won the feet-only challenge, aligning the colors of the 3×3 cube in 49.33 seconds.

Nearly 300 participants from 33 countries tried their hands and feet with the multicolored cube on the 25th anniversary of the first Rubik’s World Championships, which was also held in the Hungarian capital in 1982.

The Rubik’s Cube became one of the cult objects of the 1980s and the toy is experiencing a revival these days with millions of cubes sold annually.

More than 300 million cubes have been sold to date and organizers said 12 million will go on the shelves this year alone.

The Rubik’s Cube, an invention of Hungarian architect Erno Rubik, has been exhibited at New York’s Museum of Modern Art and has entered into the Oxford dictionary.