Milton Bradley Simon

Ralph H. Baer — already represented in the museum via Coleco Telstar Arcade (1977, his earlier work at Sanders Associates) — built the Simon prototype (then called 'Follow Me') after seeing Atari's Touch Me arcade game (1974, a commercial flop) at the Music Operators of America (MOA) trade show in 1976. Where Touch Me's arcade cabinet used four large same-color black buttons and 'harsh, grating' sounds (Baer's words), Baer's vision was a more pleasant, consumer-grade version with colored lighted panels and harmonic tones. Howard J. Morrison (1932 – January 21, 2025) was his co-inventor at Marvin Glass and Associates, the Chicago toy design firm that developed the prototype and sold it to Milton Bradley. Morrison later co-founded Breslow, Morrison, Terzian & Associates (BMT, now Big Monster Toys) and was inducted into the Toy Industry Association Hall of Fame in 1998. Software was by Lenny Cope (Baer's partner); much of the assembly code by Charles Kapps (Temple University computer-science instructor, author of one of the first programming-theory textbooks). The patent (US 4,207,087A) was filed September 19, 1977 and granted June 10, 1980; the original assignee is Marvin Glass and Associates. Milton Bradley (now Hasbro, which acquired Milton Bradley in 1984) is the publisher/manufacturer.

The Texas Instruments TMS1000 4-bit single-chip microcontroller is explicitly named in the patent text. The MCU is mask-programmed (the firmware is permanently etched into the chip during manufacture). The four colored translucent quadrant panels (red, green, blue, yellow) actuate mechanical push-button keyswitches — NOT capacitive, NOT resistive. The patent text explicitly and repeatedly calls them 'four push-button keyswitches 14, 16, 18 and 20'; teardowns confirm mechanical leaf/contact switches. Each panel has an incandescent bulb behind it (patent: 'indicator lights are located under the respective keyswitches and serve to illuminate the keyswitches') — NOT LEDs. A small loudspeaker (≈2¼-inch, 8 Ω) is driven by a driver transistor. Additional controls: three pushbutton switches (last-game recall, longest-sequence recall, start/new game), a slide switch for game select, and a switch for sequence-length target. Power: 9V battery; some early units also accepted an AC adapter. The MCU scans the switches by sequentially energizing outputs R0–R10 while sampling inputs K1, K2, K4, K8.

Simon is the museum's cleanest example of a closed-loop microcontroller-mediated human-machine interaction: machine → stimulus (light + tone) → human perception → human motor response → machine evaluation → adaptive next stimulus. The microcontroller generates a random sequence of tone + light events; the player must repeat by pressing the matching panels; correct repetition causes the machine to append one new event and replay the lengthened sequence, with the loop continuing until error or target length reached. The speed-up curve is described in patent claim 1 — the playback rate steps up automatically once the sequence crosses a threshold length, making the game progressively harder. Five game variants are described in the patent (solo, two-player, timed, record/playback, multi-player elimination). Failure produces a distinctive error tone (not a generic buzz); success produces a distinctive 'win' tone when the target length is reached (selectable: 8, 14, or 20 tones on the original). The tones form an A major triad in second inversion (resembling a bugle fanfare, per Baer's inspiration) — always harmonic regardless of sequence order. Some 1978 models used an alternate B♭ minor triad.

Simon is a closed-loop microcontroller-mediated interaction in purest form: a TMS1000 generates a stochastic audio-visual stimulus sequence, the human perceives it, responds via mechanical touch panels, and the machine evaluates the response and adaptively lengthens/accelerates the next stimulus — a real-time, embodied, single-chip cybernetic loop with no screen, no keyboard, and no linguistic content. It is one of the earliest consumer products to put a microcontroller in unskilled hands for a non-trivial human-machine skill contest, and its industrial design (circular disc, four colored quadrants, harmonic triad tones) is iconic enough to have spawned an entire genre (Merlin, Copy Cat, Einstein, Genius, Bop It, etc.) that persists to this day. The Baer connection ties Simon to the museum's existing Coleco Telstar Arcade entry, giving a coherent Ralph-Baer thread: Coleco Telstar Arcade (1977, the form-factor-as-controller console) and Simon (1978, the closed-loop MCU memory game).

Atari's Touch Me arcade game (1974) predates Simon by ~4 years. It was a commercial flop — four large same-color black buttons and 'harsh, grating' sounds (Baer's words); it couldn't compete with pinball and video games in arcades. The brief's claim that the arcade used an Intel 8080 is unverified; the arcade likely used discrete TTL logic. The Atari Touch Me handheld (1978) was released after Simon's success as a me-too product — multicolored buttons, pleasant tones, mirrored Simon's button layout (upside-down), added an LED score display, smaller than Simon. Contained Simon's three game variations and four difficulty levels (limits 8/16/32/99 vs. Simon's 8/14/20/31). The museum promotes Simon, not Touch Me: (1) Simon (1978) falls squarely in the museum's 1976–1992 window; the canonical Touch Me arcade (1974) falls outside it. (2) Simon is the patent-protected, commercially massive, design-iconic, microcontroller-driven consumer artifact; Touch Me arcade was a commercial failure with monochrome buttons and harsh sound. (3) Simon's TMS1000 is a documented, primary-source-confirmed early consumer microcontroller; Touch Me's CPU is unverified. (4) The Baer connection ties Simon to the museum's existing Coleco Telstar Arcade entry.