Twister Air takes Hasbro's classic mat game to AR screens — no mat, two Webby wins

Twister's fame came from a vinyl mat: in 1966, the year Johnny Carson played the game on The Tonight Show and set off a craze, more than 3 million sets sold by early 1967. Over five decades Hasbro kept updating the game with new moves, music and celebrity partnerships, but play stayed tied to that polka-dotted sheet on the floor.

For Twister Air (2023), Hasbro and Left Field Labs — a creative-technology studio inside Stagwell's Code and Theory Network — removed the mat entirely. Players strap eight stretchy colored bands around wrists and ankles, set a phone or tablet in the included stand, and an AR app tracks their limbs through the camera as colored spots appear over the live video. Reach, clap, swipe or pose to match bands to spots on the beat, across 16 tracks in Solo, VS and Teams modes.

The studio's custom skeletal tracking and color recognition were built to handle varied lighting, skin tones and clothing, track up to four players, and run on a wide range of Android and iOS hardware; an AI-first interface reads gestures rather than buttons. A level editor, leaderboards and automatically edited highlight reels make the game replayable and shareable.

Twister Air launched at major retailers on August 1, 2023, won Game of the Year at the Toy Industry Awards, and collected hundreds of five-star Amazon reviews. At the 29th Webby Awards in 2025 it took Best Use of Augmented Reality — both the official Webby and the public's People's Voice — plus a Kids & Family Honoree; Hasbro's board-games chief credited the studio with proving 'the movement, the laughter, the connection' still work as games evolve.