Simon is an electronic game of memory skill invented by Ralph H. Baer and Howard J. Morrison, with software programming by Lenny Cope. The device creates a series of tones and lights and requires a user to repeat the series. If the user succeeds the series becomes progressively longer and more complex. Once the user fails, the game is over. Simon was launched in 1978 at Studio 54 in New York City and was an immediate success, becoming a pop culture symbol of the 1970s and 1980s.
The device has four colored buttons, each producing a particular tone when it is pressed or activated by the device. A round in the game consists of the device lighting up one or more buttons in a random order, after which the player must reproduce that order by pressing the buttons. As the game progresses, the number of buttons to be pressed increases.
Simon is named after 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.
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