The Thesis

Before 1966, every game in your closet had one thing in common: you sat there and moved something. A pawn. A card. A token. You were the operator. The game was the machine. Then two men at a design firm in St. Paul, Minnesota looked at a vinyl mat with colored dots on it and had a thought that changed everything: what if you were the machine?

Charles “Chuck” Foley was a toy designer from Lafayette, Indiana, who’d worked assembly lines at Ford and served in the Michigan Air National Guard before finding his calling at Lakeside Toys in Minneapolis. Neil Rabens was an artist from St. Paul with a degree from the Minneapolis School of Art and Design. They met at the Reyn Guyer Company, a promotion and design firm, where Guyer had conceived a vague notion of a game involving a floor mat — originally as a shoe polish promotion. Foley arranged colored dots in rows and created a spinner mechanism. Rabens contributed the idea of a colored mat that forced physical interaction. Together they built a prototype they called Pretzel.

Milton Bradley bought it, renamed it Twister, and almost killed it. Sears rejected it for their Christmas catalog — too risqué. The company’s own sales team was skeptical. Then, on May 3, 1966, Johnny Carson played Twister with Eva Gabor on The Tonight Show. The next morning, F.A.O. Schwarz in New York was overrun with customers. By October, Milton Bradley’s factories were producing forty thousand boxes a day and still couldn’t meet demand. Three million copies sold in the first year.

The game that was too scandalous for a catalog became one of the most successful games of the twentieth century. Sixty years later, it’s still in production. Sixty-five million people have played it. And the core innovation — players as game pieces — opened a category of physical interactive play that runs from Bop It to Just Dance to every party game that asks you to stand up and do something with your body.

One game. One idea. One of the biggest ideas in the history of the medium.

Invention — 8: “Category Creator”

Twister was the first boxed game to make the players themselves the game pieces. That’s not a refinement or a smart combination — that’s a new category of play. Before Twister, games happened on a board or with cards in your hands. After Twister, games could happen with your body on a mat. The concept was so novel that industry professionals didn’t know what to do with it. Sears called it “too risqué.” Milton Bradley’s own salespeople were uncertain.

The conceptual leap is enormous: instead of abstracting physical action into tokens and dice, Twister made physical action the game itself. The spinner doesn’t tell you which piece to move — it tells you which limb to place and where. The game state is the tangled, laughing, struggling arrangement of human bodies on a vinyl mat. Nothing in the existing game design vocabulary prepared the industry for that.

Not a 9 because the mechanical complexity is minimal — a spinner and a mat with colored dots. The invention is conceptual, not systemic. Not a 7 because the conceptual leap of “players as game pieces” genuinely created an entire category that didn’t exist before, and that category is still producing new games sixty years later.

Architecture — 5: “Gets the Job Done Well”

The architecture is almost absurdly simple. A vinyl mat with twenty-four colored dots arranged in four rows of six. A spinner divided into four quadrants (right foot, left foot, right hand, left hand), each with four colors. One rule: if your knee or elbow touches the mat, you’re out. Last player standing wins.

That simplicity is the architecture’s greatest strength. Sixty years of continuous production. Sixty-five million players. No house rules needed. No errata. No expansions required for the base experience to work. The system generates physical comedy, social bonding, and competitive tension from the most minimal possible ruleset. Hasbro continues releasing variants — most recently Twister Air, an augmented reality version — because the core architecture supports extension into new formats.

Not a 6 because the system’s depth ceiling is genuinely low. There’s no strategic evolution, no metagame, no discovery curve beyond the first play. The game delivers the same experience on play one hundred as on play one. Not a 4 because sixty years of continuous production from a ruleset that fits on a single card demonstrates structural soundness that most games with fifty-page rulebooks never achieve.

Mastery — 2: “One Shot”

One game. That’s the honest assessment for game design mastery. Foley was a prolific inventor — ninety-seven patents across his lifetime, from safety darts to toy handcuffs to Un-Du adhesive remover, which won Best New Product at the 1993 School Home Office Products show. Rabens was a talented artist who went on to illustrate seven children’s books and run a custom sign business in Minnesota. They co-ran a game design company into the 1970s, but no other published game from that partnership achieved any notable recognition.

The Twister design shows real creative vision. The problem is that one game — no matter how successful — cannot demonstrate the iterative refinement, sustained output, or artistic evolution that mastery requires. Mastery is about showing the work across a body of work. Foley and Rabens showed the work once, magnificently, and then the game design career was essentially over.

Not a 3 because there’s no second game to evaluate — no evidence of sustained design craft. Not a 1 because the single game they made was genuinely brilliant in its conception and its execution, and the shared design process (Foley’s structural thinking, Rabens’ spatial intuition) produced something neither could have built alone.

The Legacy

Chuck Foley received approximately twenty-seven thousand dollars in royalties for Twister — 2.5 percent for three years, then nothing. He died in 2013 at eighty-two. Neil Rabens died in 2020 at ninety, after a quiet second career painting signs and illustrating children’s books in rural Minnesota. Neither man got rich from the game that made Milton Bradley a fortune.

But money was never what the design accomplished. What it accomplished was a proof of concept that the game design community is still building on six decades later: that the most powerful game component isn’t a card or a die or a miniature. It’s a human body in a room with other human bodies, doing something together that makes them laugh.

One game. One idea. One of the biggest ideas the medium has ever produced. The Men Who Made You the Game Piece didn’t need a second act. The first one is still playing.

Total: 19 points. Year: 1966.

FINAL SCORE: Invention 8 + Architecture 5 + Mastery 2 + Adjustments 4 = 19/41 (1966)

One game. One idea. One of the biggest ideas the medium has ever produced. The Men Who Made You the Game Piece didn’t need a second act. The first one is still playing.