In November 2003, 14-year-old Joel Berger of Kansas was crowned ‘The World’s Best Simon2 Player’ setting a Guinness World Record during the Simon 25th Anniversary Championship Playoff at Hasbro Games in East Longmeadow, Massachusetts – hosted, bizarrely, by Donny Osmond. Joel played the longest recorded game of Simon, reproducing 14 consecutive sequences. Joel said, ‘This was a cool experience and a lot of fun.’

RetroFax

• The Touch-Me handheld game is now classed as ‘very rare’
• Simon featured four large buttons; yellow, red, green and blue. Each button had a different tone. Red (A-Note), Green (A-note octave higher than Red), Blue (D-note) and Yellow (G-note). The game lit these buttons in a sequence and players had to hit the buttons in the same sequence. Game play ended when a player made a mistake
• An official wristwatch version of Simon, with the coloured buttons reduced to small bobbles at the corners of a digital watch’s face, was released by Nelsonic. There was even a key-chain version too… just how much smaller could Simon get?
• Simon is associated in popular memory with the film Close Encounters of the Third Kind, in which a spaceship, saucer-shaped and not unlike a Simon itself in appearance, emits a sequence of tones to communicate with humanity. The resemblance is, in fact, a total coincidence, but is thought to have helped boost sales of the toy
• In an episode of the animated sitcom Family Guy, baby Stewie plays Simon and loses. This scene is noted by fans as being a famous continuity error, as the position of the coloured panels on Simon is seen to change!
• Simon gave rise to many similar toys ‘inspired’ by it, notably CopyCat from Tiger Electronics, and Space Echo

They Said What?

‘[Simon] created quite a sensation… It’s hard to remember back then how relatively new the personal computer was, or how relatively new even things like a Texas Instruments sophisticated calculator were. We were in our first love affair with the computer chip, and this was the first game that capitalized on that.’ Chris Byrne, author of Toys – Celebrating 100 Years of the Power of Play

Timeline

1977		Howard Morrison and Ralph Baer file patent application for microcomputer controlled game. SIMON name registered 7 November. Reg. No. 1211692.
1978		The game, now named Simon, is manufactured and distributed by Milton Bradley. Simon was launched at the Studio 54 disco in New York.
1980		Variations of the original game, including Pocket Simon and the eight-button Super Simon, were produced.

See also

Free online versions can be found at http://www.freegames.ws/games/kidsgames/simon/simon.htm and http://www.neave.com/games/ simon/among others.

The Touch-Me story: http://www.atarimuseum.com/videogames/dedicated/touchme.html

Touch-Me arcade game is at http://www.arcade-museum.com

Merlin

The essential: Futuristic multi-game

Magically appeared: 1978

Current value: Vintage models are not cheap – can be found for £20–£25

With its distinctive bright red Bakelite livery and chunky phone-shaped design, Merlin looked like a futuristic spaceship communicator, or some kind of device that the Doctor or Mr Spock might have used to reconfigure the contrafibulation wave and save everyone from imminent destruction. It was, in fact, a versatile device containing six games in one hand-held electronic toy – Merlin, the computerised sorceror from Parker Brothers who would encourage you to try and beat him at them all.

Eleven black-and-white buttons, each sporting an LED light, sat on the red casing, above which was a speaker grille and below which one could find four selection buttons marked NEW GAME, SAME GAME, HIT ME and COMP TURN. The games available were:

• Tic Tac Toe (aka Noughts and Crosses)
• Music Machine (making Merlin into a simple sequencer)
• Echo, a memory game similar to Simon
• Blackjack 13, a version of the card game 21 (or Pontoon)
• Magic Square, a pattern game involving switching the lights off in as few button-presses as possible
• Mindbender (aka Secret Number), a game of deduction rather like an electronic version of the board game Mastermind

It’s fair to say that Merlin was a pretty simple device, underneath its space-age appearance, and it didn’t take long to gobble battery-power either.