A shoe-polish promotional idea that became "too risqué" for 1966 America — until a single Tonight Show appearance turned it into 3 million sales in its first year.
Twister is the floor-mat game where players contort themselves to place hands and feet on colored dots without falling over — the first game ever built around using players' own bodies as the playing pieces. It's been in continuous production since 1966 and was inducted into the National Toy Hall of Fame in 2015.
Twister began as toy inventor Reyn Guyer's idea for a Johnson's shoe polish promotion — a polka-dot paper mat game he called "Pretzel." Guyer brought in designer Charles Foley and Neil Rabens to develop it further, and the team eventually patented and sold the concept to Milton Bradley, which renamed it Twister for its 1966 release.
Milton Bradley itself got nervous before launch — several people internally felt a game built around physical contact and awkward body positions was "too sexual" to sell, and it nearly didn't make it to shelves. Foley, notably, received only 2.5% royalties for three years, amounting to roughly $27,000 total for co-inventing what became a multi-generational hit.
VP Mel Taft pushed for release despite internal doubts, and the gamble paid off almost immediately: when Johnny Carson played Twister with guest Eva Gabor on The Tonight Show in 1966, the sight of the two of them tangled together in front of a national audience turned the game into an overnight sensation — over 3 million copies sold in year one, and Sears began stocking it soon after.
The game's inventors reportedly repeated a specific mantra to defend it against the "too risqué" criticism: "Clean mind, clean game. Dirty mind, dirty game." Large-scale campus Twister matches kept it culturally relevant through the 1980s, and Hasbro was still citing it as a top sales performer as recently as 2019.