Simon

Simon was released in 1978 and quickly became the most popular game in the United States, selling over one million units well before Christmas. It would go on to become Milton Bradley’s top selling game of all time, bringing in tens of millions in annual revenue for the next decade. Simon became an 80s icon, remained popular through the 90s, and is still in production today, 35 years later.

The story of Simon is entangled with the dawn of a digital age where smaller, faster computers radically changed both work and play. It inspired other sound and memory games—Merlin, Bob- It, Follow-Me, Space Echo, Copy Cat, and Loopz are all direct descendants—but its influence moved well beyond the realms cordoned off for play. Encoded in the flashing patterns of sound and light was a protocol. As children copied Simon, Simon copied children. A program, encoded in carbon lifeforms, spread throughout culture.

Simon sets the pace. You follow right along.
Light the lights that Simon lights or he’ll tell you that you’re wrong.

Simon’s a computer. Simon has a brain.
You either do what Simon says, or else go down the drain.

Simon is a master. He tells you what to do.
but you can master Simon if you follow every clue.

Simon has a brain. He is named, gendered, and unpredictable. To master him, you follow his rules. He shames you when you lose and congratulates you if you win. He operates on different levels and when ignored, he reminds you to turn him off. He’s simple, but inside is a program that conjures both fascination and anxiety—the double-take of artificial life.

Although Simon was cast to play the part of the robot adversary, his brightly colored plastic interface lacks the detail and surface complexity to resolve as the enemy. The low resolution, abstract gameplay is too simple and unpredictable. His memories aren’t specific and so they don’t resolve as the memories of another.

Simon plays in a different uncanny valley, determined not by the realistic complexity of the surface but through the durational interplay of a system that appears almost thoughtful. In Simon, we find ourselves.

From Understanding Comics, by Scott McCloud...

In casting Simon as the enemy, Milton Bradley was working from an out-of-date manual. Skepticism and paranoia dominated the technological discourses of the mid-60s and continued through most of the 70s, a time of social and political unrest that resonated more with a return to nature than trajectories of scientific and technical conquest. But as microprocessors allowed for complex digital circuits to be enclosed within familiar interfaces, electronic products became intuitive, practical and affordable.

For children, Simon was more than just a toy. He was a friend, a touchable machine at a time when keyboards were off limits. While parents tried to communicate with their Apple II in symbols and codes, their small children were pushing giant glowing buttons, ‘repeating Simon’s flashing lights and sounds’. In escaping the productivity proposed by personal computers and focusing on tactile low-resolution patterns, children came to explore less predictable dimensions of the digital world. No longer just tools—computers became collaborators and teammates, then experiences unto themselves, not “wonderfully functional, but functionally wonderful—a merry- go-round of light, color, and music.”[16]