Some people say that one would have to be really bored to break out Simon from the back of the closet. But once Simon got out, things became interesting awful fast. We are not talking about a little boy living in a cupboard but rather the Milton Bradley electronic memory game, which could be played by anyone without a short memory deficit.

The earliest incarnation was actually an arcade game released by Atari in the mid-1970s. Called Touch Me and featuring no nudity whatsoever, the stand-up game didn’t cause any ripples. It had a series of four lights that blinked in random patterns and you had to hit buttons to replicate that pattern. Right. I’ll be over at Space Invaders where you really get your quarter’s worth. The game’s creator, Ralph Baer, redesigned the game to include simple music tones to match the lights and made the whole thing portable. This was what Milton Bradley marketed as Simon—just like the children’s game of Simon Says—and this version did quite well, starting in 1978. Atari kept on beating a dead horse and released a hand-held version of Touch Me which, predictably, drove people away in hordes. It was bad enough the line between humanity and technology was getting blurred all the time, no one was eager to play with a machine that craved caresses. Simon, being less needy, was an instant hit.

Simon has changed little over the years. It is circular, roughly the size of a vinyl record, looks a bit like a smoke detector and has four colored panels that light up. A player must hit the panels in the order in which they light up and if the sequence is executed correctly, one more color is added and so on. The goal is easy to achieve when the sequence consists of a few colors but things get hairy with more complicated patterns. If a player guesses incorrectly, Simon blows an electronic raspberry, making a heart-stopping buzzing sound that cuts you to your very soul. You just hate to disappoint Simon.

After the initial success of the game, Milton Bradley released Super Simon in 1979, with dual panels that pitted players against each other. Also available was Pocket Simon for those long waits at the dentist’s office. Thirty years later, Simon’s appeal hasn’t waned and sales continue to be respectable even in these Playstation times.