Back in the waning days of the Clinton administration, according to Insider, a group of college students at Albright College in Reading, Pennsylvania were holed up inside their dorm room while a blizzard raged outside. It was 1999, and entertainment options were limited, so the men — identified by the New Zealand Herald as Craig Fass, Mike Ginelli and Brian Turtle — were watching “Footloose” on TV. During a commercial break, the lads, who by this point had had a few tall, cold ones, caught a commercial for another Kevin Bacon movie — “The Air Up There” — and landed upon an idea. Bacon was seemingly in everything, and eventually they figured that any actor, living or dead, could be attached to Kevin Bacon in some way.
The game became something of a fad around Reading, says Turtle. “[It] became one of our stupid party tricks I guess. People would throw names at us and we’d connect them to Kevin Bacon.”
But the lads decided that, if they mailed the right letters to the right people, the game could become worldwide. The guys wrote to Jon Stewart, at the time the host of “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart,” and soon enough the guys were on Stewart’s and other shows, and the game blew up from there.
