Issue #5: Tamagotchi, The Hell and The Fun This Little Device Is

Say that you’re a kid in the 90s. It’s Christmas day and under the tree there’s a present for you, and it’s finally your turn to open your presents. You reach for that box, you open it, and you find yourself holding a box, and inside, a little egg-shaped device.

A tamagotchi.

You’ve been asking your parents for one for AGES, as all your friends had one, and finally here you have it. You don’t know yet, but that device will become a chore for you, and Hell for your parents.

☛ What is a Tamagotchi?

Originally marketed towards teenage girls, a Tamagotchi (from tamago, egg in Japanese and watch), is a handheld digital pet device created by Akihiro Yokoi and Bandai, released in Japan in 1996 and worldwide in 1997, after Yokoi saw an ad about a boy trying to take the family’s pet turtle on vacation, and were originally supposed to be worn like a watch, hence the name. In 2017, Bandai rereleased the gen1 and gen 2 tamagotchis with new shells to celebrate the toy’s 20th anniversary.

When you first remove the tag at the side, (or press the RESET button) an egg will appear on the screen. When you press any button you will be prompted to set the time (on some models player name and birthday too) and after that, the egg will wiggle on the screen and after some time (five minutes usually) it’ll hatch. From that moment you will have to care for the creature, (according to the lore, an alien from far away) until they become adults, and if you fail to do so, they will go back to their home planet (but actually, they just die). The toy became so popular that eventually Bandai released multiple different versions, each with their own unique game mechanic, like the Angelgotchi, Connection, Uni, Pix…

You might wonder, what was The Thing with this toy? Don’t ask me, because even if I used to spend whole afternoons taking care of my digital pet, I didn’t even know why I was doing that. I guess it taught me time management, the fact that I couldn’t trust my mom caring for it when I was at school, and grief. (you heard that right!)

☛ Care or die (literally)

Tamagotchi most times do what they can do best: die. But why did they die? And how?

A core mechanic of most Tamagotchis (if not all) is care. To explain it simply, care is the system that calculates how well you’ve been taking care of your Tamagotchi. When the pet calls for you, and you successfully fulfill your Tamagotchi’s needs, (whether they’re hungry, they want to play or if it’s a discipline call), the device will track how fast you respond, or if you will respond at all.
If you don’t (or you do, but you’re too late), the device will add a point to a secret “care miss” counter, and if you accumulate too many, it’ll influence the character your tamagotchi will evolve into, or worst case scenario, it dies. (though tamagotchis usually die from other ways of neglect, most times they die by “I got sick and died because you didn’t clean up my poop”.)

But if you do everything right, (feed it actual meals instead of snacks, clean up its mess, and play with it when it wants to) you’ll get one of the good evolutions that complain rarely and that live a long happy life.

And if you ever want to know how to get a specific character, look for growth charts. Most are fanmade, some original. To me they were like tarot cards, to be honest. I hoped for the cute ones, but deep down, I knew I was getting the blob. Because no one has perfect care stats when you’re eight and your mom says you can’t bring your tamagotchi to church.

And after all, kids get attached to their tamagotchi, sometimes even too attached.

☛ The Emotional Attachment (and Why They Got Banned in Schools)

Now, if you ever owned one you know how often Tamagotchis beep at you. And if you know how eight year olds are, you know that they’ll do anything to bring something like that everywhere with them. (I did that too okay) so of course kids would bring their pet to school too. And what happened if they called for you during class? Teachers took them away, and then schools started straight up banning them (as if that solved the problem), and as a kid that was confusing and a dumb rule probably, especially when the teacher had one for herself.

☛ The death and surprising comeback of Tamagotchi

Tamagotchi sales started slowing down towards the end of the 90s, and the school bans partially contributed to that phenomenon, and Tamagotchis just weren’t the hot topic they once were. But in November 2017, to commemorate the brand’s 20th anniversary, Bandai rereleased a revised version of the Tamagotchi gen1 and gen2, reaching 82 million sales counting the ìsales of the 1997 version too.

☛ Tamagotchi in other media

You’d think that Tamagotchi is just a silly game, right? Actually, no. The franchise got big. And they made a whole-ass animated movie about it called Tamagotchi: The Movie (2007) (and it’s on youtube!) There’s also a sequel, but I haven’t watched that one yet.

Besides movies, there have been GameBoy games (it’s literally just a game called Tamagotchi in the US), DS games (like the Tamagotchi Connection Corner Shop series!) and also a Mario Party-like game for the Wii called Tamagotchi: Party On!.

So if you ever got tired of the little egg Tamagotchi, you could always play with the GameBoy, DS or Wii one instead.

Personally, Tamagotchis have been a core memory of my childhood. Hell, I cursed for the first time because I lost at the jumping rope minigame in front of my mom. I don’t know about y’all here, but if you are here for the 90s/2000s nostalgia you probably have one too, and now it’s the right time to share your experience with one, or maybe talk about your favorite spinoff game.

A magpie that lives in my neighborhood is obsessed with my Tamagotchi and tries to steal it every time I go outside.
-Dam