How a Century-Old Oktoberfest Game Became Fetish Porn

It’s that time of year again, when a historically maligned European community comes together to drink an absolute shit-ton of beer. No, you haven’t been in a coma for six months — it’s Oktoberfest. And it might look a little different this year, at least on the internet. Specifically, depending on the perversion level of the algorithm you’ve curated, you might see a lot of videos of women playing a certain game that’s been popular at Oktoberfest for over a century but has now become fetish porn.

Let’s back up. The game is called Teufelsrad, or “Devil’s Wheel.” It involves a large, traditionally wooden wheel set into the floor that spins horizontally, and the object of the game is to sit as close to the center of the wheel as possible and try not to get thrown off by centrifugal force. It was first presented at Oktoberfest by German showman Carl Garbiel in 1908, and if there was any creepiness in its origin, nobody’s admitting to it. The game isn’t limited to women, after all — men and even children are also encouraged to play, albeit in gender- and age-segregated groups. It’s good, wholesome fun for raging drunks and their kids.

So why, then did Google searches for it suddenly spike off the charts in early 2024?

That also requires some zooming out. You can find videos of games of Devil’s Wheel on YouTube going back years, maybe decades if you look hard enough. (There’s no evidence of what caused that initial spike in May 2008, so it’s possible a pig got scrubbed from the internet.) When you look at the comments on those videos, they’re surprisingly respectful. “Wow, that lady really hung on!” etc. It was a more innocent time.

They didn’t really gain traction, however, until late 2023. That giant spike at the end of the graph is actually two spikes — a big one during the week of September 17th to 23rd and an even bigger one from January 14th to 20th — that seem to be attributable to two viral TikTok videos. The first came from @kirmesaktuellyt, which was picked up by Bro Bible and eventually earned more than 13.3 million views.

This one, too, is surprisingly safe-for-work. The woman depicted is wearing flesh-colored shorts and, in an effort to lower her center of gravity as much as possible, doing the splits face-down on the wheel. That sounds filthy, but it’s certainly not as bad as the dawning realization by viewers of the video that as women are thrown from the wheel, you can see right up their skirts. Then, on January 14th, @disco.tta posted a video of a woman who does indeed look like she could make a lot of money on OnlyFans struggling to stay on the wheel, which was viewed more than a million times.

That was also the day a YouTube account called devilswheel4k scored its first 2-plus million views. The appropriately named account had posted a few dozen videos since October, but they’ve since started posting a lot. A lot, a lot. They’ve never managed to capture quite the same success, but a few thousand guys who discovered a new fetish are surely incredibly grateful.

And if you had any doubt that this was a skeevy thing and not just innocent interest in giggly girls on wooden wheels, we need only to direct you to the related search terms recorded by Google, which include “panties,” “upskirt,” “flash,” and to the certain horror of misguided fantasy fans, “The Wheel of Time.” 

It’s worth noting that the game is played barefoot, but “feet” don’t appear anywhere on the list. 

That’s where we’re at: determining exactly which weirdos are responsible for which new perversions.