How the Classic American Game of Twister Went From Risqué to Record-Breaking

Sixty years ago, Johnny Carson and Eva Gabor played Twister on the “Tonight Show,” and the public took it as permission to buy the controversial game

Kunjal Bastola | Editorial Intern

May 1, 2026

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Left hand, blue. Right foot, red. Sound familiar? These are just some of the instructions you might hear while playing the wildly popular party game called Twister.

The premise for the game, released in 1966 by game-maker Milton Bradley, came from a toy inventor named Reyn Guyer. While working for his father’s company, Guyer conceived the game as promotional material for Johnson Wax shoe polish’s back-to-school campaign. He envisioned players standing and moving on a mat that featured colored spaces, to highlight the shades of shoe polish, while also blocking their opponents from moving around.

“It was, I believe, novel for the time, the idea of players themselves being used as the play pieces,” says Yve Colby, curator of the National Museum of American History’s Division of Home and Community Life and a toy and game expert.

Though Johnson Wax ended up rejecting the game, the idea stuck with Guyer. He then hired two game designers, Charles Foley and Neil Rabens, to help refine the product. Mirek Stolee, curator for board games and puzzles at the Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester, New York, says that according to his research, Rabens’ biggest contribution was having players put their hands and feet on the board, while Foley is credited with the idea to line up dots of each color in rows, instead of scattering them across the mat. From there, the team took the game, then called Pretzel, to Milton Bradley.

The game’s minimal components, which included simply a mat, spinner and the players themselves, stood out to Milton Bradley, though when the time came to manufacture the game, Colby notes, its name was changed to Twister to distinguish it from a dog toy named Pretzel.

The public response to Twister

Although we now know it to be a universally loved game, upon its initial release, in April 1966, Twister was not well received; some critics even called it “sex in a box.” Deemed too risqué for its emphasis on participants’ proximity to one another, the game was rejected by popular toy stores like Sears.

All of that changed on May 3, 1966, when comedian and then-host of “The Tonight Show” Johnny Carson and Hungarian American actress and socialite Eva Gabor played Twister on the popular nighttime television show. Both were intrigued by the mat when it was brought out and were soon bending and twisting their bodies on live television.

“Mel Taft, head of development at Milton Bradley, arranged to get the game played on the Johnny Carson Show,” Guyer told the Guardian’s Nancy Groves in a 2014 interview. “Carson was enticed onto the Twister board to play live with Eva Gabor, wearing a very low-cut gown. The next morning, Mel was standing in a queue 50 deep at Abercrombie & Fitch, which was rumored to have Twister for sale.”

Twister’s popularity skyrocketed, and by the next year, more than three million copies of the game had been sold.

“It is a defining moment for the game that may not have ended up what it is today without being put on the show,” says Colby. “It does sort of change the story for Twister.”

How Twister became a staple

Over the next few decades, the game continued to grow in popularity, becoming a household fixture in the ’70s and ’80s. Featured in many commercials and heavily marketed as “the game that ties you up in knots,” Twister attracted people of all ages and was gifted to kids on birthdays and Christmas. It made Games magazine’s “Top 100 Games” list in 1980, ’81 and ’82.

By 1987, Heidi Bailey was all too familiar with the game’s allure when she orchestrated another attention-grabbing moment in its history. Now an alum and a marketing professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Bailey was then just a student with an idea, having seen a story about a school in New York holding a record-breaking Twister tournament.

“So I said, ‘Hey, you know, wouldn’t this be so fun to have everybody play?’” she recalls.

Bailey worked with the rest of her school yearbook staff and Milton Bradley to organize and promote another record-breaking Twister game, this time at UMass Amherst.

At around the same time, anti-CIA protests, led by activists Abbie Hoffman and Amy Carter, daughter of former President Jimmy Carter, were sweeping the campus. Many people were critical of students coming together and organizing, says Bailey, and she hoped that this massive Twister game could change those perceptions.

“We were like, ‘No, we can do this. We can bring all these people together and have this really fun event,’” she says.

Planning the game took a few months. Bailey remembers employing creative marketing tactics to promote it.

“We had a VCR tape of Back to the Future when we were sitting in the student union. We played that in the background,” she says. “That would draw people over, and then we would tell them about [the game]. They’d get their friends involved too.”

The yearbook team also contacted a local car dealership, persuading its owners to paint Twister dots on the cars in their lot to promote the event.

Their hard work paid off on May 2, 1987, when UMass Amherst broke the Guinness World Record for the most participants in a single game of Twister, with 4,160 players.

“Everything went really smoothly. It was a beautiful, sunny day. They literally threw me in the pond,” Bailey says.

Their record still stands today.

A reprise on “The Tonight Show”—and the game’s many different versions

In 2016, the year of Twister’s 50th anniversary, “The Tonight Show” featured the game again. This time, host Jimmy Fallon and actress Kristen Stewart added a fun twist: Jell-O shots. Fallon held up a photo of the famous 1966 game, asking Stewart if she’d like to play his new version.

“It’s the same rules as Twister, but there’s a Jell-O shot on every color,” says Fallon. With a third person calling out the instructions, the two twisted and contorted and took Jell-O shots for the next couple of minutes; Stewart eventually emerged victorious.

The risqué element that initially proved to be an obstacle for the game has diminished. “There’s this sense that Twister can be conceived of in a very wholesome way,” says Stolee, adding that it has multigenerational appeal.

The game has taken a variety of twists and turns. From Twister Splash, a yard game featuring a water-spraying mat, to Twister Air, a mat-less augmented reality version that is app-enabled, there are now many versions.

“You know, most people have heard of it. A lot of people have played it,” Stolee says of the legacy of the game, which was inducted into the National Toy Hall of Fame in 2015. “Twister has pervaded the culture.”

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Kunjal Bastola is an editorial intern with Smithsonian magazine.