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1968 - Reyn Guyer began a new Toy and Game Development Company which he called WINSOR CONCEPTS. He hired Martin Lundquist, Norton Cross, Ken Barnes,
Will Kruse, and Barbara Griggs and created a workspace adjacent to The Reynolds Guyer Agency of Design.
While the group was working on a 'caveman' game, Will Kruse began bouncing one of the foam 'rocks' over a net. That was NERF's AAHH moment. Reyn and
his team all proceeded to cut foam balls out of different weights of foam packing material.
Norton Cross found a manufacturer who cut foam with heated wire. The team created five or six game ideas using the foam balls
Reyn and Norton went to the Milton Bradley Company which had succeeded with the TWISTER game three years earlier. Milton Bradley turned the ideas down.
The ideas were next shown to Henry Simmons, the New Product Development Director for Parker Brothers. Mr. Simmons and his team, to the disappointment
of the Winsor Concepts group, decided to put the foam balls in a box and sell them individually.
Parker Brothers decided to name the balls NERF after the foam padding that off-the-road enthusiasts wrapped around their roll-bars.
1969 - The NERF BALLS were an instant success.
Soon Parker Brothers began to look other fun ways to use foam in toys.
They urged Reyn to include all other products that were made with foam as part of the original contract and after some consideration, he decided to commit
exclusively to Parker Brothers and not take new foam ideas to other toy companys. It turned out to be an excellent choice.
Since the introduction of the NERF BALL, many inventors have contributed to the product extension of toy products which have, as their main ingredient,
expanded polyether and polyester materials such as:
Basketballs, Soccer balls, Baseballs, Footballs, Ping-pong balls & Pucks
Projectiles of many types including foam darts and soft round foam pellets
The marketing of the NERF products has been managed by several different toy and game companies and is in the hands of Hasbro Inc. in Pawtucket R.I.
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