On this date in 1966, a patent was granted for the game of Twister. 10 things you might not know about Twister.
Twister was invented by Ron Guyer, when he was working in his father’s ad design office trying to come up with an idea for an ad for shoe polish when he suddenly had a completely unrelated idea: What if there was a game where the players are the pieces?
Guyer experimented with a few ideas and eventually applied for a patent for the game we know today, although his original name for it was “Pretzel” because that was what the players would end up looking like.
Pretzel, however, was already in use as a name for a toy dog already on the market, so toy company Milton Bradley changed the name to Twister. Guyer hated the name, however, as he associated it with deadly Tornadoes and not a fun evening playing games with family and friends.
Its first tagline was ‘The game that ties you up in knots.’
It got off to a rocky start because some retailers, including Sears, decided it was too racy to sell. They called it ‘sex in a box’ and boycotted it. Even some executives at Milton Bradley agreed and thought mixed sex games would be in poor taste. Even using cartoon characters on the box rather than photographs of real people failed to placate the detractors.
The company were about to give up on Twister, but they’d already forked out for a promotional slot on Johnny Carson’s show. That went ahead, with Carson playing Twister with actress Eva Gabor. Which, you’d think, would only reinforce the risqué reputation. In any event, the public loved it. The day after the show aired, people were queuing outside Abercrombie and Fitch, one of the few shops which hadn’t boycotted the game. Guyer says. “By Christmas 1966, we were the game of the year.” There were subsequent press reports that teenagers were playing the game naked, which would have dealt a severe blow in relatively prudish 1960s America, but it all blew over and Twister, and the company, survived.
Twister was banned in Germany, not because it was too sexy, but because at the time, it was frowned upon in that country for women to take their shoes off in public.
Colour blind and even totally blind people can play, thanks to adaptations to make it more accessible, using textures and Braille. Sighted players can join in wearing blindfolds. Blindfolded Twister is an accessible variant with four different tactile symbols on the mat.
In 2015, Twister was inducted into the National Toy Hall of Fame.
The record for the world’s largest Twister board was set in 2015 country music singer Thomas Rhett spliced together 1200 regular-sized mats to create a 27,159 square-foot playing area as a publicity stunt at one of his concerts. The record for the most players, however, wasn’t broken at this event. The 1987 record of 4,160 players was still held by students at the University of Massachusetts.
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