The Most Surprising Game Of Simon You’ve Every Played

How does one take a game of Simon and make it extremely awesome? The folks at the North Street Labs — a Hackerspace in Portsmouth, Virginia — have found the secret and it’s all in the execution. They turned this chair-desk into a coin-operated Simon game that hides a huge surprise.

We suppose you should be able to guess the secret. Most coin-operated sidewalk attractions are rides, and so is this. As their Red Bull Creation entry the team built a base for the desk around a 2000 Watt floor buffer. These are the kind of things that you’d see a janitor in the 1980’s using to polish the tiles of your middle-school.  This one just happens to shake the bejesus out of a player who makes a mistake. To help suck you into the game this won’t happen right away. You have to make it past at least four rounds before making the mistake.

The rest of the game is as expected. The playing area is nicely milled from a piece of wood with acrylic windows serving as the buttons. Apparently the biggest problem with that part of the build is finding a way to hold everything together despite the intense vibrations. See for yourself in the clip after the break.

18 thoughts on “The Most Surprising Game Of Simon You’ve Every Played

    1. indeed, but who can blame people for their guilty pleasures?

      the game itself looks like a fun concept, combining the utterly innocent with a vulgar shock to the system.

      the shocked look on some of the faces are priceless.

    1. I’m thinking its the same as programmers that write junk code very fast that still manages to work or amazing welders that can’t even cut a straight line using a horizontal bandsaw.

      There is a limit to human ability and accomplishments outside of their field are measured by if they work and not how. Best to finish many projects and only polish the ones that take off.

      Oh and that video is incredible. So many good ones this week.

    2. Nxpguy, we can and have in the past. Time constraints would be your answer. Balancing work, school, and building a functional device (with video) by the deadline was pretty tough. The reactions alone have been worth it though!

    3. with all that dead simple “no soldering needed” breakout-and-breadboard solutions, doing things properly and not just for the fame and fun can seem not zeitgeisty enough. It’s not that those people can’t, they don’t care.

  1. Perhaps it’s the sicko in me but the woman in the lead photo had me think vibrations, before I read the remainder of the paragraph, after I dismissed administering an electrical shock to strangers as the stupidest thing one could do. Looks to be fairly wicked shaking. To me it would seem that in time the players would now what they are getting into, and hop on to play anyway, just like any other amusement ride. That one dude looked like he was expecting something to happen and was confused why it didn’t.

      1. It doesn’t stand up very long! We already had to add thread locker on the nuts and bolts, and glue into the wood screw holes! It will need an upgrade for long term use, mainly to better support the wooden desktop.

    1. It’s all about the fun ;)

      Red Bull giving attention to creativity highlighting it to the masses isn’t all that bad. I wouldn’t expect time portals though.

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