The Simon Game: How Long a Sequence Can You Remember?

Simon is an electronic memory game with four colored buttons, each with its own tone. The game plays a sequence of lights and sounds, you repeat it, and every time you get it right it adds one more step. Get the order wrong and the game is over (Smithsonian). Children in one large study managed about 3 to 6 steps depending on age, and researchers put adults’ best runs at around seven.

Where Simon came from

Inventor Ralph Baer developed Simon with the Chicago toy design firm Marvin Glass and Associates. He got the idea after seeing an Atari arcade game called Touch Me at a 1976 trade show, and set out to make a better, more musical version. Milton Bradley released Simon in 1978 (The Strong National Museum of Play).

The Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History has a 1978 Simon from Baer in its collection. Its record notes that the name came from the children’s game Simon Says, and that the four tones were chosen because they’re notes a bugle can play (Smithsonian).

The patent, filed in 1977 by Baer and his Marvin Glass colleague Howard Morrison and issued in 1980, describes how the original worked. The machine always adds “one more tone to the prior sequence” each round, and the player could choose a target length of eight, fourteen or twenty tones to win (US Patent 4,207,087).

How to play today’s version

Hasbro’s current classic Simon is a one-player game for ages 8 and up. After each sequence you repeat correctly, one light is added to the end. When the game ends, it shows your score in lights: an all-lights flash counts as 10 and a green flash counts as 1 (Hasbro). Holding the power button shows your high score (same source).

How long a sequence can most people remember?

Simon is a test of short-term memory for order, so researchers have used it, and games like it, to measure memory span.

• In a 2016 study, 374 children aged 6 to 10 played a Simon-style task with red, green, yellow and blue buttons. When the sequences were hard to group, the average longest sequence they got right rose from 3.1 colors at age 6 to 4.3 at age 10. When the sequences contained repeats that could be grouped, the averages were higher at every age, from 4.3 to 5.7 (Mathy et al., 2016).
• For adults, the same paper notes that maximum span on the Simon game “revolves around seven,” citing earlier work with college students (same source).

Seven sounds like the famous “magical number seven” from a 1956 paper by George Miller. A later review argued Miller’s figure was “more a rough estimate and a rhetorical device than a real capacity limit,” and that the true limit is about four chunks (Cowan, 2001). The two numbers can both be right: people reach around seven items in Simon by grouping several items into each chunk, which is why the 2016 authors say adults’ seven or so items probably aren’t seven separate chunks (Mathy et al., 2016).

A close cousin: the Corsi block test

Psychologists measure the same kind of memory with the Corsi block-tapping test. The tester taps a series of blocks, and you tap them back in the same order. Reported averages differ between studies:

• A 2006 study found spans rising steadily through childhood and leveling off in early adolescence, with eighth graders averaging 6.9 and young adults 7.1 (Farrell Pagulayan et al., 2006).
• A 2024 study of 340 healthy adults aged 21 to 89 found an average span of 4.97, with lower scores at older ages and higher scores with more years of education (Facchin et al., 2024).

The gap comes mostly from who was tested and how. The 2006 figures are for young people, and the 2024 study, which is newer, covers all of adulthood into the late 80s. The two studies also used different sequences and scoring. A fair summary is that most adults land somewhere around 5 to 7, depending on age and the version of the test.

How to remember longer sequences

• Look for patterns. Sequences with repeats or runs are easier because you can group them. In the 2016 study, being able to group items added more than a color to children’s spans at every age (Mathy et al., 2016).
• Lean on what you already know. In a Simon-like lab task, people got better at repeating new sequences that followed the same hidden rules as sequences they’d practiced on (Karpicke & Pisoni, 2004). In Simon, each round repeats the last one plus one new step, so concentrate on the new step and let the familiar part run on its own.
• Listen as well as watch. Each button in Simon has its own tone, so the sequence is also a short tune you can listen for.

For a number-based version of the same idea, see our guide to the digit span test. To remember much longer lists, a technique like the memory palace works better than raw span.