Reyn Guyer, co-inventor

In 1965, I was working for my father's design company, inventing cheap gifts to be used in promotions with Fortune 500 companies in the midwest. I was trying to devise a self-liquidating premium, which is where shoppers would collect coupons and get a gift in return. One day I was in the middle of designing a playmat when a thought suddenly occurred to me: this could be bigger.

Board games were popular then: Monopoly, The Game of Life, all the old classics. But there was nothing that used players as pieces. So I went out to the bolt-end, as we called the place where our artists worked, and spread out a large sheet of corrugated board. I drew a grid and talked them into getting on it. I allotted each person and square a colour – red, yellow, blue, green. Then I said: "Your job is to get to the other side of the grid, taking turns."

Soon it made no difference whose turn it was, we were laughing so hard. I knew we were on to something. My father went to the bank and – together with Chuck Foley and Neil Rabens, two gentlemen I'd met at a Minnesota manufacturing fair – we developed the game and took it to Milton Bradley, then the US's largest puzzles manufacturer.

It was a team effort. Foley suggested having circles in a row, Rabens had the idea of putting your hands down as well as your feet. We called it Pretzel because people always ended up in a pretzel shape. When Milton Bradley couldn't get that name, they chose Twister instead. That disappointed me: I equated that word with disaster. But nobody else seemed bothered.

Everything was proceeding nicely – then I got a call just before Christmas: "I'm very sorry but we have to cancel everything. Sears doesn't think it's appropriate for their catalogue." Now, it's been said that if you have a naughty mind, then Twister's a naughty game – many people have told me over the years that it has had a positive effect on their romantic liaisons. But a bunch of people crowding together in a small space? Sears felt that was abusing a moral rule.

It was a big blow. We'd invested a lot of time and money in this. But in my experience, breaking a rule often engenders success. Mel Taft, head of development at Milton Bradley, arranged to get the game played on The Johnny Carson Show. Carson was enticed on to 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 rumoured to have Twister for sale. It became the game of 1966 and the royalties started rolling in. And my father? He was very happy. The first thing we did was pay off the bank.

We came up with hundreds of other ideas, most that didn't work out. One fellow in our team said: "You know what's really hip these days? Trivia." I told him to cost up a game, and two weeks later he said: "It works, but we'd have to charge $35." Nobody was selling games for over $12 then, so we didn't do it. Then along came Trivial Pursuit. You see? There's somebody breaking a rule.

When I fill out forms these days, I always put inventor for my occupation. Actually, I think everyone's an inventor: people come up with new concepts all the time. I just happen to work with the fun ones.

Mel Taft, head of development

I was always a games nut. Growing up, we had so many toys on our porch, the local newspapers came round to interview us. My teacher told my mother: "Mel is monopolising the building blocks. The other children have to pay him a penny each to get them back." My secretary at Milton Bradley told me a group from Minneapolis wanted to come and show me something. They'd never made a game before and, when I showed it to my sales manager, he said: "What you're trying to do there is put sex in a box." He refused to play. He said it was too far out, kids wrapping themselves around each other like that.

I had three couples coming round for dinner at my house, so I took it home and we all laughed so hard I thought I had appendicitis. But even then, the reaction of the buyers was good, but not wild. So I had our publicity girl see if she could get the game on Johnny Carson.

Johnny's guest that night was Eva Gabor, a gal famous for her sex appeal. Someone brought out the mat, and Eva, God bless her, said: "What's this, Johnny?" When he saw she was interested, he made her get down on all fours and climbed on top of her. The camera was on both of them and her dress, very low-cut to begin with, dropped even lower. The audience went absolutely bananas.

We shifted more than a million games that first year. Then I introduced it to Europe. English folk were initially a little bashful about the body contact, but kids loved it. The one country where it did poorly was Germany. I went out to some stores in Nuremberg and asked people why. Turned out German women didn't like to take off their shoes in public. Later, in the US, we had a run of stories about teens throwing parties where they'd play Twister in the nude. I thought that was going to harm us. It didn't.