Ancient Web: Torsten Sillke Saved an Elevator Prank List Inside a Twister Shrine

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

A mathematics lecturer maintaining a fan page for the board game Twister might seem unusual. Finding ninety absurd suggestions for elevator rides inside it makes perfect early-Web sense.

Read the 90 Fun Things to Do in an Elevator page.

Torsten Sillke's University of Bielefeld homepage links mathematical puzzles, algorithms, and games. One branch is an elaborate Twister fan page that collects the game's invention story, old advertising, virtual spinners, party activities, shirt designs, photographs, and humor.

The elevator page survives within the site's Twister Stories section. The title promises ninety pranks, and the numbered text ranges from deliberately silly sound effects to asking strangers to play games. Two entries actually recommend producing or laying down a Twister mat in the elevator.

Lists before they needed an author profile

The document is a specimen of shareable Internet humor: straight numbering, no author introduction, almost no formatting, and jokes that might be copied into email or passed between personal pages. Its exact original creator and first circulation date are not established by the surviving page. It would be misleading to credit Sillke with writing all ninety items merely because his site hosts them.

The larger Twister section offers a much more attributable form of collecting. It points to the 1966 patent filed by Chuck Foley and Neil Rabens, and includes a game-history page reproducing an extract from a 1991 board-game history. Readers can encounter 1960s design, nineties party culture, and modest HTML humor in the same click path.

It even describes a 1994 networked virtual Twister demonstration connecting Monte Carlo and Yokohama, citing a report available through the page. Some external links now point to disappeared sites or old promotional materials.

What survives is not a polished archive of one subject. It is a record of how an enthusiast used university web space to mix hobbies, borrowed jokes, documentary sources, and links to kindred pages.

Browse the original Twister collection.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.