Cheery Chimp

Memory — also called Concentration, Pairs, or Pelmanism — has no single inventor. It's a folk game, reshaped by nearly every culture that picked it up. Its deepest roots reach back to a Japanese court pastime called kai-awase, a Heian-era game in which players matched pairs of decorated clamshells by their painted interiors. The same idea — hide identical items, then recover the pairs from memory alone — was later a common way to play with an ordinary deck of cards, matching by rank and color across Europe and America.

Its many names trace those travels. Americans call it Concentration; the British know it as Pelmanism, after the Pelman Institute, a London memory-training school founded in 1899 whose exercises included matching hidden pairs. In Japan it's Shinkei-suijaku, in the Czech lands Pexeso, and to many players it's simply Pairs or Match Match.

The boxed version most people picture today came from the German publisher Ravensburger. In 1959 it released "Memory," credited to the Swiss inventor Heinrich Hurter and developed in-house by Ravensburger's longtime game editor Erwin Glonnegger; the company still holds the trademark on the name. By cutting the deck down to just two of each design instead of a full set's four, that edition made the game sharper — and it became a fixture of childhoods and classrooms everywhere, since the same flip-and-remember loop doubles neatly as practice in observation and recall.