The cube was a lie: up close with our Dbrand Companion Cube before it gets destroyed

The cube was a lie: up close with our Dbrand Companion Cube before it gets destroyed

Dbrand is the company that shipped a product that told Nintendo’s legal team to “go fuck yourself,” and the company that had a second set of lawyer-dodging PS5 plates ready when Sony threatened to sue over the originals. But on June 29th, the company finally ate some serious humble pie, canceling its Portal-themed Companion Cube external shell for the Steam Machine after Valve lawyered up.

Dbrand will destroy them all, but we took some photos first.

I couldn’t believe it. Surely Dbrand had to have seen this coming. There must be a plan B, right?

“There is no further plan. We fucked this one up,” Dbrand CEO Adam Ijaz now tells me. He says Dbrand will now have to destroy every single cube it manufactured, and it won’t even get to throw them in an incinerator for thematically appropriate fun.

Here’s the good news: I took up-close-and-personal photos of the (likely) copyright-infringing gadget for posterity on June 19th, before the lawyers struck. You can wistfully imagine what could have been, or use them as an outlet for your schadenfreude at Dbrand’s incredibly embarrassing mistake... or both! I won’t judge.

Here are all my photos in roughly chronological order: