Simon (game)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A modern version of Simon. The original game had an opaque black case

Simon is an electronic game invented by Howard J. Morrison and Ralph Baer (See U.S. Patent 4207087), with the software programming being done by Lenny Cope and manufactured and distributed by Milton Bradley. Simon was launched in 1978 at Studio 54 in New York City and became an immediate success. It has become a pop culture symbol of the 1980s.

The game unit has four large buttons, one each of the colors red, blue, green, and yellow. The unit lights these buttons in a sequence, playing a tone for each button; the player must press the buttons in the same sequence. The sequence begins with a single button chosen randomly, and adds another randomly-chosen button to the end of the sequence each time the player follows it successfully. Gameplay ends when the player makes a mistake or when the player wins (by matching the pattern for a predetermined number of tones).

The game has three variations, set by a switch on the front of the case, with a second switch setting one of four difficulty levels.

Simon Says (Game 1): The player simply follows along as described above (with four difficulty levels requiring the player to match a sequence of 8, 14, 20, or 31 tones).
Player Says (Game 2): The player makes his own sequence at any of the four difficulty levels. Simon chooses the first tone, and then the player can make any sequence he wants.
Choose Your Color (Game 3): A multi-player game in which each player takes one or more colors. When Simon presents a pattern, the player must only push his own color in sequence. Hitting your color out of sequence causes it to be eliminated. Simon then starts over with the three remaining colors, then two, and the last player left is the winner.

It is named for the simple children's game of Simon says, but the gameplay is based on Atari's unpopular Touch Me arcade game from 1974. Simon differs from Touch Me in that the Touch Me buttons were all the same color (black) and the sounds it produced were harsh and grating.

Simon's tones, consisting of:

A (red, upper right);
a (green, upper left, an octave higher than the upper right);
D (blue, lower right, a perfect fourth higher than the upper right);
G (yellow, lower left, a perfect fourth higher than the lower right).

These tones were designed to always be harmonic, no matter what order they were played in. Atari released a handheld version of Touch Me later in 1978, with multicolored buttons and pleasant musical tones. However, its late timing meant that it was generally derided as a clone of Simon, even to the extent of including the same three games and four difficulty levels, albeit with limits of 8, 16, 32, and 99 instead of 8, 14, 20 and 31.

Simon is still sold today by Milton Bradley (now owned by Hasbro), in its original circular form, though with a translucent case rather than plain black. It is also sold as a two-sided "Simon Squared" version, with the reverse side having eight buttons for head-to-head play, and as a keychain. Other variations of the original game, no longer produced, include Pocket Simon and Super Simon, both from 1980.

Clones include Tiger Electronics' Copy Cat in 1979 and re-released with a transparent case in 1988, Castle Toy's Einstein, and an unbranded clone called Space Echo. Copy Cat was also released by Sears as Follow Me.

The same gameplay also appears on multi-game handhelds such as Mego Corporation's Fabulous Fred (Game 3, The Memory Game) and Parker Brothers' Merlin (Game 3, Echo). Finally, Atari also included a nine-button version of Touch Me as game variations 1-4 (out of 19) on the 1978 Brain Games cartridge for the Atari 2600. Radio Shack also sold a small portable version called Pocket Repeat.