Simon: The Best-Selling Toy of Christmas 1978 Still Had No Patent

By Matthew Partsch · Owl and Twig Vintage · October 1, 2026

Milton Bradley put the Simon name into commercial use five weeks after the patent application was filed, debuted the game at February 1978’s Toy Fair, and sold it as the hottest toy of that Christmas — all before the patent covering how the game actually worked was granted, in June 1980.

What the 1977 patent actually claims

U.S. Patent 4,207,087, titled “Microcomputer Controlled Game,” describes a device with four push-button switches, each wired to its own tone and its own light. The patent’s own language states the core mechanism plainly: “the machine generates a random sequence of tones which must be accurately repeated by the participant. The machine then repeats the latest sequence and adds another tone to the sequence.” Play continues, one tone longer each round, until the player breaks the chain or reaches a preset maximum length. A second claimed mode lets several players take turns extending the same sequence, eliminating whoever breaks it first until one remains.

Howard J. Morrison and Ralph H. Baer are listed as co-inventors. The assignee of record is Marvin Glass and Associates, the Chicago toy-and-game design studio where both men worked as consultants — not Milton Bradley, which licensed the finished concept for manufacture and retail sale rather than inventing it. The application was filed September 19, 1977. It was not granted until June 10, 1980.

A trademark filed before the toy reached a shelf

Milton Bradley’s own federal trademark filing for SIMON, Registration No. 1,211,692 (Serial No. 73147711), states a first-use-in-commerce date of October 26, 1977 and a filing date of November 7, 1977. Both dates sit five weeks or less after the patent application itself, and months before anyone outside the companies involved had seen the finished game. The registration describes the goods covered in exact legal language: “Equipment Sold as a Unit for Playing an Electronic Type Parlor Game,” filed under International Class 028 (games and playthings). The mark wasn’t formally registered until October 5, 1982, four years after Simon’s retail debut; it has been renewed twice since and remains active today under Hasbro, which absorbed Milton Bradley in 1984.

A name can enter commercial use, and a patent application can be filed, well before a single unit reaches a store — the same pattern this series has already found in Melmac’s trademark and PAAS Easter egg dye’s. Simon adds a third date to that sequence: the patent behind the mechanism wasn’t granted until two and a half years after the trademark application, by which point the toy had already finished its best-selling year.

Looking for a vintage Simon, another Milton Bradley electronic game, or a piece from the same late-1970s cohort for the shop or your own collection?

Search Simon electronic game Search vintage Milton Bradley

The night at Studio 54

Milton Bradley unveiled Simon publicly at February 1978’s Toy Fair in New York, then staged a formal launch party at Studio 54 on May 15, 1978, timed to the disco’s late-night crowd rather than a toy industry audience. At $25 retail (close to $90-120 in today’s dollars, depending on which year’s conversion is used), it became the season’s breakout: some stores reportedly sold 1,000 units in five days that holiday, and Milton Bradley rationed stock to dealers to manage the demand. More than 10 million units had sold by 1982, four years into the run.

Of the handful of late-1970s electronic memory games that followed Simon onto shelves — covered below in the look-alikes section — it is the one still in production today, carried forward by Hasbro through a long run of reinvented hardware (Simon Swipe’s touchscreen ring, Simon Air’s motion sensors, Simon Optix’s wearable headset) that keeps the original four-button, four-tone idea underneath.

The arcade game Simon borrowed from, then borrowed back

Simon did not start from nothing. Atari released an arcade cabinet called Touch Me in 1974, built around the same basic idea later patented for Simon: a player watches a sequence of lights and repeats it back by touching the matching buttons, with one more step added each round. Baer and Morrison saw Touch Me at a trade show in 1976 and judged the execution harshly. Baer’s own verdict, as later quoted in coverage of the game’s history: “Nice gameplay. Terrible execution. Visually boring. Miserable, rasping sounds.”

Once Simon became the bigger commercial success, Atari released its own handheld version of Touch Me in 1978, after Simon had already reached stores. The Smithsonian’s own object record for that Atari handheld states the sequence directly: Baer and Marvin Glass “saw that version of the game at a trade show and improved upon the concept with the portable game Simon,” and Atari’s own handheld followed afterward. The arcade original supplied the mechanic; the home version it inspired then supplied the form factor back.

Model numbers and how to date one

Milton Bradley sold several distinct Simon-family products across 1978 to 1980, and sellers frequently blur them together under the single name “vintage Simon.” The model number printed on the underside of the unit identifies which one is actually for sale.

• Check the light source before the case color. An incandescent bulb behind the panel (rather than an LED) is consistent with an early 1978 production run; a spare bulb still taped inside the battery compartment is a strong sign the unit hasn’t been serviced.
• Read the model number off the underside, not the box art. Box graphics were reused loosely across the family; the stamped model number is the more reliable identifier.
• A “Senso” or “Mi Amigo” label is not a knockoff. Milton Bradley sold the same hardware under “Senso” (Super Senso, Mini Senso) in Germany and “Mi Amigo” in Spanish-language markets — a regional trademark choice, not an unauthorized copy.

The look-alikes

Simon had real competition on shelves within a year or two of its debut, though most of it was commercially short-lived. Atari’s own handheld Touch Me (1978, described above) and Tiger Electronics’ Copycat were both direct rivals in the same sequence-memory category; both had left the market by the 1980s while Simon kept selling.

Waddingtons’ Wizard (1979, model #2004, made in Hong Kong and sold in the UK by Grandstand under the name “Adam”) is a four-in-one electronic game unit that includes a Simon-style memory game as just one of its four modes, rather than a single-game copy of Simon itself. That distinction matters for a seller or buyer trying to identify an unmarked unit: a device that plays more than one kind of game, with a different button layout or case shape, is more likely a multi-game competitor like the Wizard than an unlicensed Simon copy.

Where the records disagree

The Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History holds a 1978 Simon in its collection, donated by Ralph Baer himself, and its own online catalog record lists “Maker/Inventor: Ralph H. Baer” with no second name. The patent itself, the legal record of who actually invented the claimed device, names two co-equal inventors: Baer and Howard J. Morrison. A third name does real, specifically credited work in most detailed retrospectives of the game’s development — programmer Lenny Cope, who wrote the core game logic under the project’s working title, “Follow Me” — without appearing on the patent or in the museum’s own catalog entry at all. None of these three records contradicts another on a verifiable fact; a museum crediting its donor and a patent naming its legal inventors can both be accurate in their own terms. But a reader who consulted only one of them would come away with a narrower account of who built Simon than the full record supports.

A second, smaller disagreement sits in the model-number table above: a widely read history page gives 1979 as Super Simon’s release year, while a specialist collector reference built specifically to catalog Milton Bradley’s handheld-game output gives 1980. Neither source could be independently verified against a primary document for this guide, so both years are given rather than one asserted as settled.

What a Simon sells for now

No confirmed auction-house realized price could be found for an original 1978 Simon for this guide — consistent with a toy that sold more than 10 million units: common survivors rarely reach a category auction houses track individually. A current eBay listing, “Vintage 1978 Electronic Simon Says Game COMPLETE,” a used example with its box, is priced at $44.99 as an active asking price, not a completed sale. Condition and completeness (working electronics, original box, intact light bulb or confirmed working LED replacement) move the price for a toy this common far more than age alone does; a non-working unit missing its box typically asks well under $20.

Hunting for other handheld electronics, novelty toys, or late-1970s game-era pieces for the shop or your own collection?

Search vintage electronic toys Search 1970s handheld game

For another guide built around the same inventor patenting a foundational device years ahead of the product it would define, see the Magnavox Odyssey, the console whose patent beat Atari in court, Ralph Baer’s earlier and even longer-delayed patent story. For another guide where a product reached store shelves and succeeded well before its own patent was granted, see the Polaroid SX-70, which shipped before its own patent was granted. For another late-1970s electronic toy built around a Texas Instruments chip, see Speak & Spell, the voice on a chip that outlived its own trademark. See more Field Guides