Nelsonic Simon

Nelsonic was a well-known watch brand in the 1980s and, where game watches are concerned, the brand was synonymous with the Space Attacker.

They had a number of other watches based on arcade games of the early 1980s, including Q-Bert, Pacman, Frogger and Donkey Kong. Some kind of licensing agreement with Nintendo meant they were producing watches based on console games too — a series of Super Mario game watches and Zelda — and a random collection of themes including Barbie, Ghost Busters, Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, and Simon.

The original Simon, created in 1978 and distributed by Milton Bradley, involves repeating a random sequence of moves determined by a computer by pressing corresponding coloured segments (it’s much more fun than it sounds). There are other variations too, but that’s the general gist of it.

It was incredibly successful and has been re-released in different formats and form factors ever since; you can still buy brand new Simon variants today.

It lends itself well to becoming a wristwatch game and Nelsonic pretty much nailed it.

As well as being a standard timepiece, the watch features a melody alarm, and the game. True to the original, it has the same coloured buttons on each corner that the full-size game has, and the colours in the corners of the LCD turn black, with accompanying tone, as the game plays. Get it wrong and it lets you know with all four corners turning black.

There’s no score function but then again there wasn’t on the original game either.

Very rare, sells for way more money than it’s worth — but plenty of fun especially if you had the original game in the 70s (or 80s).

Here’s a video (not mine) of the gameplay: