Simon Electronic Game
The circular, four-button memory game invented by the same engineer who built the first-ever home video game console — still being reinvented by Hasbro nearly 50 years later.
Simon is a simple, addictive memory game: it lights up and plays a growing sequence of colored buttons, and you have to repeat it back correctly to advance. It launched in 1978 and became an instant cultural fixture — and unlike most electronic toys from that era, Hasbro has kept releasing new versions of it every few years ever since.
Invented by the father of the home video game
Simon was invented in 1976 by Ralph H. Baer and Howard J. Morrison at toy design firm Marvin Glass & Associates, with software written by Lenny Cope. Baer isn't a random name here — he's widely credited as "the father of the video game," having developed the Magnavox Odyssey, the first home video game console, before turning his attention to Simon.
The concept was directly inspired by Atari's arcade game Touch Me — Baer thought the gameplay was compelling but found it visually and audibly boring, and set out to build a more polished, purely audio-visual version of the same memory-challenge idea.
A rare toy that keeps getting reinvented instead of just re-released
Simon launched with a splashy debut at Studio 54 in 1978 and was an immediate hit, becoming enough of a pop-culture fixture that it's been referenced in shows from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia to Silicon Valley. It's also preserved in the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History.
What's unusual is that Hasbro hasn't just kept reprinting the original — it has released genuinely different versions roughly every few years: Simon Squared (two-sided play) in 2000, Simon Stix (drumstick controllers) in 2004, Simon Trickster in 2005, and further variants since, each adapting the same core memory mechanic to new formats.
