Simon (game)

Simon is an electronic game of short-term memory skill invented by Ralph H. Baer and Howard J. Morrison while working for the toy design firm Marvin Glass and Associates. The device is a round unit divided into four colored panels, each of which lights up and sounds a distinct tone in a growing sequence that the player must repeat by pressing the panels in the same order. Each successful round adds one more step to the sequence, and a single wrong press ends the game, so the challenge escalates purely from the player's own memory rather than from an opponent's moves. Simon was launched in 1978 at the nightclub Studio 54 in New York City, a debut that helped it become a fixture of popular culture through the late 1970s and 1980s. The original version was manufactured and distributed by Milton Bradley and later by Hasbro after it acquired Milton Bradley, with much of the underlying program code written by Charles Kapps, a Temple University computer science professor.