The legendary rapper turned actor Ice Cube is amazing at inhabiting the image he's cultivated over many decades, and is comfortable playing around and sending himself up. And somehow, this is how we've ended up with Ice Cube as a Minecraft claims adjuster.
Last year Mr Cube starred in a new take on The War of the Worlds, a production that began around the start of the Covid-19 pandemic and had the neat idea of showing the invasion play out through our everyday screens: phones, tablets, what have you. This was of course riffing on Orson Welles' radio production of the same material, which used the technology of its time so effectively that some listeners were fooled into believing the invasion was real.
The film essentially features Ice Cube sitting at a PC for extended periods of time but, unfortunately, wasn't very good. In fact that's an understatement: several outlets called it the worst film of 2025. It has a Metacritic score of 6 out of 100.
Such a reception would cow lesser mortals but Ice Cube is the kind of celebrity who leans into the infamy and has some fun with it. Hence why he's now sitting in front of a PC, ready to judge players' Minecraft compensation claims from his "Ice cubicle"
In the annals of marketing stunts, the "Ice Cube Claims Adjuster" is a good one. There are several short skits being gradually posted across the Minecraft social media accounts, and doubtless there are some very confused parents out there wondering why one of the coldest gangster rappers of all time is now laughing at their kid falling off a Gast.
That's very much the joke here: players submit their "Cube claims" to the Minecraft social accounts, and every single one of them is then "DENIED" by a lucky social media manager who gets to pretend to be Ice Cube. Particularly good ones are being plucked out and get their own little video of the man himself chewing up the scenery before, yep, declaring that their claim is denied.
There's the endless punning possibilities of Ice Cube talking about a game built out of cubes, but also constant opportunities to joke about usernames and gently mock players for dying in dumb ways: as well as a whole range of retro-styled images of Ice Cube denying claims. You can tell that Mojang's already having a ball with this, and the Ice Cube Claims Adjuster could well become a minor fixture for one of the world's biggest games. This might be one of the more unexpected celebrity hookups we've seen, but the more I look through the skits and messages, the more convinced I am that it's genius.
