Simon (game)
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Simon is an electronic game. It was launched in 1978 at Studio 54 in New York and became an immediate success. The brainchild of electronic inventor Ralph Baer (who had developed the first home video game console, the Magnavox Odyssey, in 1972), and manufactured and distributed by Milton Bradley, Simon went on to 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. Game 1, Simon Says, had the player simply following along as described above (with four difficulty levels requiring the player to match a sequence of 8, 14, 20, or 31 tones). Game 2, Player Says, lets the player make 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. Game 3, Choose Your Color, is 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 left);
- a (green, upper right, an octave higher than the upper right);
- D (blue, lower left, a perfect fourth higher than the upper left);
- G (yellow, lower right, a perfect fourth higher than the lower left).
Simon is still sold today by Milton Bradley (now owned by Hasbro), in its original circular form (though with a transparent case instead of black), as a two-sided "Simon Squared" (with the reverse side having eight buttons for head-to-head play), and 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, again, a transparent case) in 1988, and one from an unknown company called [Space Echo]. Copy Cat was also released by Sears as [Follow Me]. The same gameplay also appeares on multi-game handhelds like Mego Corporation's [Fabulous Fred] (Game 3, The Memory Game) and Parker Brothers' [Merlin] (Game 3, Echo). Finally, Atari also included a ten-button version of Touch Me as game variations 1-4 (out of 19) on the Brain Games cartridge for the Atari 2600 in 1978. This is probably not a complete list.
Simon is considered a classic electronic game and remains popular, even nearly thirty years after its original release.
External links
- [Hasbro's line of Simon games]
- [Online version with rotating field and custom difficulty levels]
- [Online version of Simon]
- Play [Simon Says] online
- [Simon Extreme for Mac OS X]
- [Includes the story about how Simon was "adapted" from Atari's game]
- [Pictures of the various versions of Simon]
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