Concentration

The concept of this game seems to go back to 12th century Japan, where it was (and is) known as Kai Awase, join the shells. It became associated with marriage and was often part of a dowry. As the name suggests, it was palyed with shells, shells that had been gold plated on the inside and a scene painted on them.

At some unspecified time in the 19th century, the game turned up in England under the names of Pairs or Pelmanism. Pelmanism is actually a system of mind and memory training devised in the 1890s by William Joseph Ennever, and taught by correspondence from the Pelman Institute in London. It is possible that Ennever recommended this game, which became thus associated with his method, or maybe it is just because Pelmanism was rather popular in the UK in the first half of the 20th century and thus became a natural association with everything related to memory.

In the 1940s the Basel kindergarten teacher Bertha von Schroeder published a not very successful Zwillingsspiel based on the same principle. Inspired by this game, Heinrich Hurter created a similar game for the children of his son William, military attaché in London. He cut out identical pictures from catalogs and magazines and glued them to square cardboard pieces. His grand children liked the game, and it became soon known among their friends as the memory game.

After returning to Switzerland years later William Hurter sought a publisher for the game and found one in Otto Maier Verlag in Ravensburg, one of the biggest German publishers of games and jigsaw puzzles. They presented it on the 1959 Nuremberg fair as memory (in all lower case and a fancy font). It became their best selling item, selling 50 million in the next 50 years. Memory, jealously guarded by Ravensburger as a trademark, is the common name for this type of game in the German speaking world and wide parts of Europe. It is an amusing example of an English word used in other languages for something it isn't used in English (handy for cell phone is another example).

Concentration for PC
Concentration	Amnesia	Auto Concentration	Cognito
Duplo	Match Game	Match Up	Matching Tiles
Memory	Memory 2.1	Memory Tiles	Pairs