The Tamagotchi Cemetery | Hacker News Reader

The Tamagotchi Cemetery

burialsandbeyond.com

196 pointsgot-any-grapes117 comments

The most memorable video games of my childhood were Final Fantasy 2 (aka FF4 in Japan), and FF7. And the most memorable moments from those games are when they killed off playable characters that I had become quite fond of. Those 16 bit graphics on the SNES, combined with the right musical score, could create a pretty moving experience.

I never had a Tamagotchi, but I can understand how the loss of a digital pet could have been quite traumatic.

I wonder if modern graphics and voice acting might actually be making games less immersive, by asking less of players' imaginations when it comes to completing the characters. Or it may just be that I'm older now.

> I wonder if modern graphics and voice acting might actually be making games less immersive, by asking less of players' imaginations when it comes to completing the characters. Or it may just be that I'm older now.

Depends on the game but I think you may be experiencing survivorship bias. You can remember the greatness of old games (I do too, still have very fond memories of Monkey Island) but right now you are going through a raw, unfiltered experience and get to see the few good games that will be remembered and also the bad games that will be forgotten in a year or two.

Good voice acting can make the experience much more immersive than it has ever been, What Remains of Edith Finch is a great example of that. Voice acting in that game makes it feel like someone is narrating a good book and adds a ton of emotion to the story, the amazing sound track also helps with that. Modern graphics help games such as The Last of Us or Horizon Zero Down make you feel like you are part of the story, living through it along with the characters. Those things don't ask less of your imagination, they let you focus your imagination on other aspects of the story now that you don't have to worry about pretending that a bunch of blurry pixels is a person.

I'd like to conclude that that's just my personal experience and anyone can feel exactly the opposite and also be right.

As someone who puts Final Fantasy VII on a pedestal—for multiple reasons, including, but not limited to, the fact that I learned English to understand the plot when I was a kid—, I have to agree with you.

While the plot from Final Fantasy VII still holds up, and a certain character's death in the game was my first experience with death, games like The Last of Us—especially the second one— and Ghost of Tsushima have a much bigger impact on me today than Final Fantasy VII did at the time, and the voice acting is a big part of that; characters feel more real, which make me care.

Actually, Horizon Zero Dawn is a good example of that. My wife and I loved the game and did every single thing we could, but the atrocious voice acting means that while we loved the gameplay and story, we did not care about the characters at all.

> the atrocious voice acting means that while we loved the gameplay and story, we did not care about the characters at all.

I think part of the issue for me is that I'm subconsciously holding modern graphics and voice acting up to the standard of a Pixar movie (which I consider to be generally quite good). When a character is badly voiced, it really grates on me. And the "uncanny valley" effect of unrealistic facial animations is an immersion killer for me as well.

When dialogue is text-based, it's my own voice which I am hearing - and is far less likely to be offensive to me. Bad writing (or just too much dialogue) can of course still be an issue.

I didn’t find HzD voice acting to be atrocious

Does anyone have a side by side comparison of good vs bad voice acting in video games, I know plenty of example of universally bad voice acting but when it comes to flagship or AAA titles the criticisms seem arbitrary

This is analogous to someone telling me Red Dead Redemption has bad voice acting or Detroit Become Human was the worst due to that reason

I cant really tell the difference and I’m pretty content with that, but curious about what other people are judging

Silent Hill 2 vs HD remake:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7GKtsHcJOMI

This is helpful but even here it took me a few of the clips to know which one was the bad one

Halfway through it was obvious that the remake was bad

I can still see how I would have ignored this in other games

I don't know if the HD remake would have bothered me so much as the original felt really engaging and ethereal.

> Actually, Horizon Zero Dawn is a good example of that. My wife and I loved the game and did every single thing we could, but the atrocious voice acting means that while we loved the gameplay and story, we did not care about the characters at all.

I had forgotten how bad it was but you helped me remember. I played the Spanish dub of the game which is even worse. The graphics are great but the voice acting and robotic conversations kill a bit of the immersion.

> Modern graphics help games such as The Last of Us or Horizon Zero Down make you feel like you are part of the story, living through it along with the characters.

Except it doesn't work for me. It's in an uncanny valley of near realism, where I notice every flaws and bugs that instantly break the immersion. Same with character development: due to growing up and kind of getting more experience of humankind I find myself becoming more demanding on character and worldbuilding coherence. When huge parts are up to the imagination, suspension of disbelief works for me. I just found I can still get emotional over a few pixel Tamagotchi by reading that article. But with modern graphics, the bar is set very high for everything else to follow and be credible (it needs to be like a strong very long good movie).

> Except it doesn't work for me. It's in an uncanny valley of near realism, where I notice every flaws and bugs that instantly break the immersion.

Same for me. The high-fidelity of graphics promises me a realistic simulation of the world, while the gameplay immediately breaks immersion (e.g. if I punch one of the friendly NPCs in the face, they usually don't take offence and continue as if nothing happened etc. etc.). In the lo-fi games, it was clear from the beginning that the game is just a richer chess or minesweeper or mario or any other purely mechanical system and there were no pretense of realism - they were more coherent this way.

I think for this reason 1998-2004 was the golden age of gaming. Hardware capabilities got good enough that fairly rich 3D environments and mechanics were possible, but they were primitive enough that there was no pretense at complete realism and imagination could fill the gaps. Games were also cheap enough to produce, so novel ideas could get funded and smaller studios could make AAA games.

Gaming audiences were also still small enough that you didn't have to pander to the lowest common denominator.

All of the above resulted in such gems as Deus Ex, System Shock 2, Silent Hill 2, Metal Gear Solid, etc. I do not think this is nostalgia talking either - some of these games I only played for the first time recently and many years after their release.

To me, it's a combination of the story, the storytelling, voice acting and music. The graphics can help with the immersiveness of a game, but they're only secondary. The games I used to play as a kid like Monkey Island, Sam&Max and Full Throttle still hold up today, despite their dated graphics.

I bought an Xbox last year and a copy of Red Dead Redemption 2. It instantly brought me back, the same feelings and attachment to the main characters. I broke up a little when Arthur died.

I can appreciate the modern, realistic graphics but without the rest... it's just a technical fad. While the other way around you can still make a great, immersive gaming experience without realistic graphics.

It depends as much on the genre as it does the game. Some games aren't intended to be immersive. Take Action Fighter, The Ninja or Sonic on the Master System -- all hugely awesome action games but none are trying to build suspense-based drama, which is where the feeling of immersion is really felt the most. Like the catacombs in Phantasy Star. All of the aforementioned are Sega Master System titles but action titles invoke very different types of concentration to the latter game.

Another example is Sultan's Maze on the Amstrad CPC 464 (bottom of http://www.cpcgamereviews.com/s/index26.html). It's an 8bit game for a 64KB machine and yet that ghost used to make me jump every time despite being rather questionable graphics even for the 80s.

Imagination is definitely powerful enough to fill in the blanks but you need a particularly kind of game to draw you in.

Let's also not forget that as we age, our imagination becomes less powerful. People often blame our fondness of retro games as sample bias (like you have done too) but often it's just younger gamers having better imaginations and a lower bar for what they find entertaining. I've seen this first hand playing Atari 2600 games with my kids. Playing Jungle Hunt (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZxw4MfXnNs) my, then, 4 year old son corrected me when I referred to what appeared to me as a blocky shark -- to which my son replied "It's a crocodile daddy". And it obviously is -- but that I mean it is only obvious to adult me now that I've been told.

I've played modern generation games, grew up with 80s-era BASIC micro computers and have played on practically every system -- console and computer -- released in between. And as you might have guessed from my stories above, I still own and collect these systems too. But what made a game immersive wasn't the graphics nor voice acting (though these elements can certainly pull you from the moment if they're too jarring), it was games that required one to concentrate on longer term strategies from perspective of avatar rather than concentrate on quick reactions from immediate threats (as one typically sees in arcade-style action games).

> What Remains of Edith Finch

The cannery scene was done so very well.

Have you played the FF7 Remake? More than anything, it feels a lot more immersive to me than the original.

I have not, since I don't have a PS4. If I am ever able to get my hands on a Playstation 5 I will definitely make sure to. I think that would be a really interesting comparison.

I'm also tempted now to go and give Final Fantasy 3 (aka FF6) a play through. I've never actually played that game, even though it's widely considered to be a better game than FF2. It would be a good way determine how much of my fondness for those other games is nostalgia vs. them being great games in their own right.

> I never had a Tamagotchi, but I can understand how the loss of a digital pet could have been quite traumatic.

As a kid I cried when it "died". Taking care of the thing for days, seeing it grow, caring for him when sick, it sure created some attachment even though I knew it was virtual.

And because I couldn't bring it at school, parents had to take care of it sometimes, with the pressure of knowing I would badly react if it didn't receive proper care and died (or became sick).

Not sure this is positive, it could certainly have done without this feature. At least my parents didn't thought that me crying over a piece of electronics was very healthy.

My little cousin was like this. His tamagotchi was fully happy, well fed, etc. But he seemed too attached to it.

One day I told him "I am going to set you free, bro" and reset it. He was pretty upset about it at first but then thanked me.

Few years later I saw him playing an MMO. I think it was Ultima Online. I asked him what he was doing and apparently he was ambushing and mugging newer players. I hope both things were unrelated.

I still regret telling a few friends about Ultima Online at the time. They got addicted and it spread like virus and in no time the whole town was playing it. There was no place you could hide from conversations about weapons,attacks,and custom servers.

TV is not addictive but for some people it is. Same with food or shopping... and the Internet, and games.

It is not your fault.

I had something happen to me that was similar. I was forever scrounging for points for this cocacola thing. One day I realized I had let some expire. I gathered all of them up and dumped them in the garbage and did a little dance in my kitchen yelling 'im free!' my wife thought I was nuts. I am now on the look out for engaging patterns companies use to draw you in. Point systems are one of them.

> on the look out for engaging patterns companies use to draw you in

I think about this all the time. Tamagotchi was the start. Every where I look, all I see are variants of Tamagotchi.

eg Quantified self help productivity hacking are just treating your own self as the Tamagotchi.

My favorite was Final Fantasy 6.

I did not notice how dark some themes in the game were until later in life when I replayed the game. Seeing an entire city being poisoned, magical robots built with energy drained from enslaved magical creatures, murder, suicide, poisoining, mind control, abandoned babies, feral kids, cults, fires, cataclysms, possessed artwork, trains to the afterlife, tyranny, etc.

But that's part of what makes it a great game.

The SNES had many good JRPGs in addition to Final Fantasy, like Chrono Trigger, Secret of Mana, Seiken Dendetsu 3 (aka Trials of Mana), Super Mario RPG and others. They are worth playing even today.

Not sure if voice acting is the problem because the first Metal Gear Solid on PS1 is still one of the best video game and movie experience for me.

Metal Gear Solid is a good counter example that I hadn’t thought of. The voice acting (or at least my memory of it) was excellent, and I really did develop a fondness for Snake and everyone else on the radio.

But Metal Gear Solid had great voice acting! Much better than MGS5, anyway.

And so did Deus Ex. Part of the fun was that these games did not take themselves super seriously, they did not pretend to be an overly-polished (to the point of being sterile) Hollywood blockbuster.

It's a bit like 80s movies. They weren't realistic, they had cliches, they weren't polished, but they were awesome!

I don't think it's age. These days I've replayed The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall and I find it more immersive than The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.

Both are of the same genre. The latter has much better graphics (and it's a great game) but the former's labyrinthine dungeons, with foreboding music, rats and bats screeching and skeletons roaring, never fail to make me feel the oppression of being in hostile underground tunnels. The relief when I exit the dungeon, quest completed, and I hear the sounds of nature, almost makes me feel the fresh air in my face...

I suspect that the difference is that, if the graphics are just "bad" enough, the player starts filling in details from their own imagination, and I suspect that this increases immersion.

Being young and impressionable probably also helps.

More than just that. Think about "artsy with personality and taste" artwork in 2D games, which was enforced because of limitations.

> I wonder if modern graphics and voice acting might actually be making games less immersive, by asking less of players' imaginations when it comes to completing the characters.

I’ve had Red Dead Redemption 2 for two+ years and I accidentally read a spoiler early on and I still can’t bring myself to complete the story because I’m so attached to a character I know will die. I’m probably dreading this character’s death far more than I dreaded my Tamagotchi’s and I was well and truly devastated the first time my Tamagotchi died.

It is not a very challenging game, but that is the core idea of Spiritfarer [1]. You care for spirits, help them come to terms with their finality, and take them to the afterlife. They give you enough of their back story to explain why their behaviors and preferences are what they are. You figure out their favorite foods, try to keep them happy with their accommodations and care, and then have to say goodbye forever.

It is done very, very well. It's easy to get attached to these characters and then have to let go of them.

10/10 in my book.

[1] https://thunderlotusgames.com/spiritfarer/

I still play text adventures because of that.

A good script can inmerse you better than most ultraHD graphics.

As a kid growing up in the 90's I had a knock off (not sure which one), but i wasn't responsible enough to really take care of it or care other than the initial "oh wow" wore off. My pet's regular death never took note.

Now that I have a 3 year old, I think about responsibility - teaching life, death and taxes.

For some, it really did give a sense of ownership and heartbreak, which are important. For others it taught death is cheap and revival is just a click away.

No answers from me, just a lot of questions about how to raise my child.

I remember the moment when lag killed my hard core Diablo2 paladin.

Every game seemed more interesting when you had everything to lose. I found it interesting that this isn’t true for the general public, and all games started going easy mode to appease the masses (who wanted to experience games more like movies).

> I remember the moment when lag killed my hard core Diablo2 paladin.

This is why I don't play roguelikes.

Curiously, I'm perfectly fine with roguelikes since long ago, but I can't muster emotional energy to get back to XCOM: Enemy Unknown (the modern one) since one of my characters on a team died there (I still vaguely remember the map), even though I could theoretically reload a save from before it happened. The feeling doesn't seem to wane, and surprises me to no end every time I think about that.

Grab XCOM 2. Its a solid step forward from enemy unknown and you might not feel the same disappointment.

Maybe I didn't express it clearly enough, but I don't think I'd call it a disappointment, more like emotional trauma of losing this character.

I'm sorry I communicated poorly. I know what you meant. What I meant is that I think maybe you could rekindle the old joy you felt but not feel the emotional loss when booting it up since its a whole new game :)

permadeath is a gentler mechanic in games where a run lasts at most an hour or two and either ends in a win or a loss, and not being able to play that character any more.

there's also the eve online / tarkov variation where dying results in the loss of most or all items you had equipped -- potentially a major setback if you were wearing most of your wealth -- but items stashed in other locations and skill point based progression is largely not impacted

Roguelikes are turn based, you have plenty of time to set up a strategy.

I tend to play my games in "No Backsies" mode, where available. In KSP, for instance, you can have permadeath for your Kerbals, etc.

People have dumped the roms and disassembled the game, here’s an index:

https://github.com/loociano/tamagotchi-tech-specs/blob/maste...

So odd that this article is on HN today. I recently purchased a Tamagotchi for my five year old son and I feel a ton of responsibility for it as I don't want to disappoint my son. Unfortunately it has died a few times from accidental reset or being accidentally left in the car throughout the day. But over the past week or so while he is in school, I make sure the Tamagotchi is with me everywhere I go so I can ensure it's healthy throughout the day.

Interestingly, seeing this made me Google Tamagotchi, thinking my daughter might like an old school Tamagotchi. Apparently, a new “Tamagotchi Pix”[0] product is releasing July 1st. It’s $60 and has a camera for some reason.

Was the original Tamagotchi only marketed towards girls? It looks like the new one will be available only in purple and pink.

[0] https://tamagotchi.com/product/tamagotchi-pix/

They've got blue and green as well on that website. $60 and it's got a camera though? Hell no.

Right, my mistake, I looked at the Amazon page which has preorders for pink and purple, but didn’t want to link that so I instead linked to the official page.

Blue and green are right under those colors.

Ah the Amazon US page is only showing the preorders for Pink and Purple.

Try the Tamagotchi On instead, which that site calls the “original.” It’s not, but it looks like it’s better for you. See: https://tamaon.tamagotchi.com/products/

Edit: I also see the "original" for $20 on Amazon, which looks like it's actually the original? See: https://smile.amazon.com/Tamagotchi-42873-Original-Sky/dp/B0...

If you have it around you Target sells the OG tamas, the newer ones are fun but I don’t much care for needing to transfer them to my phone to play games. The self contained aspect was enjoyable to me.

> Was the original Tamagotchi only marketed towards girls? It looks like the new one will be available only in purple and pink.

IIRC, the boy version was Digimon. Basically the same toy, but you could battle them.

Unisex but over time skewed towards what seem like a more feminine market.

Can still buy the old school versions and they feel very unisex to this day.

Later models seem geared towards younger kids in general.

No, the Digivices [0] were a completely different toy: It lacked the caring aspect and used a pedometer to make progress in traveling the world, where on occasion you'd get an alert about encountering an enemy digimon. If you ignored it your Digimon would be injured and you'd have to heal it.

In addition, to get in on the craze, other companies made their own products that played identically to tamagotchis. Tiger Electronics had the Giga Pet brand [1], for example, from which I had the alien.

Quick edit: Ah wait maybe you meant these [2], which were before the Digivices. I never had one, don't know if they were more like tamagotchis.

[0] https://wikimon.net/Digivice_Toy

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giga_Pet

[2] https://digimon.fandom.com/wiki/Digimon_Virtual_Pet

>don't know if they were more like tamagotchis.

They were and are! (They're still releasing new models, at least in Japan.)

But yes, the Digimon v-pets were definitely marketed as basically "tamagotchi for boys" and the gameplay is very similar.

They were basically battling tamagotchi.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FuzMB5y8rOw

>Was the original Tamagotchi only marketed towards girls?

Pretty much. Girls had Tamagotchi and boys had Digimon.

I don’t agree with that. At the height of tama mania everyone had one.

Usually, digi was a more complicated knock off that fit a different niche of people who like battling Pokémon.

Edit: I had both, but digi personally wasn’t all that fun and everyone did tama because it was mellow and easy. We played Pokémon if we wanted to battle.

It also came out later? I think I had a tamagotchi in 1994 or 1995 - I think digimon didn’t show up until a year or two later.

I think tama was 96 and digi was like 98 or 99.

>Usually, digi was a more complicated knock off that fit a different niche of people who like battling Pokémon.

"Knock-off" is a strange description for a product made by the same company as the Tamagotchi. Can they make knock-offs of their own product?

Heh, I guess. It seemed inferior hence the knock off bit.

Digimon was pretty much a Tamagotchi marketed heavily towards boys, but the original Tamagotchi was fairly gender neutral - I remember when they were big when I was a kid plenty of my male friends had one.

Not sure why this is downvoted. Wikipedia says that Tamagotchi was initally marketed exclusively to teenage girls, whereas Digimon -- made by the same creators -- was deliberately aimed at the male audience.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamagotchi

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digimon

That was in Japan though.

By the time Digimon arrived, the Tamagotchi hype had already subsided a bit (at least here in Germany). And while I knew more girls with one than boys, there were several boys who did (including myself).

Both situations can be true at the same time. IIRC, Tamagotchi were a big hit where I live (Poland), I remember wanting to get one, playing with one someone had, and that it was discussed on a news program the other day - and popularity seemed gender-netural too. Everyone was fascinated with the new digital toy (well, kids were; parents not so much). Digimon came much later, past the popularity wave - and the only person I ever knew who had one (and still has it, and it still works) was my sister.

Apparently the Digimon device had a bunch of "social" features - multiple devices could talk to each other (don't remember if it was contact or infrared) - but I think she never met anyone else to test it with.

There are several Tamagotchi like apps, In Ubuntu Touch(UBPorts) Openstore there's Sakawochi where one can grow fishes[1]. I'm not telling you should get UBPorts for this, but this was one of the Tamgagotchi like apps I tried and maybe an old phone with UBPorts for this app would be appropriate for kids.

[1]https://open-store.io/app/sakawochi.wendigosoft

> and has a camera for some reason.

There is a new Pokemon game coming out called "Pokemon Snap" where apparently the whole game consists of traveling through the game world and taking photos of Pokemon. Similarly there is a feature in the Pokemon Go game where you can take photos of your Pokemon in AR.

I just cannot even fathom who this would appeal to, but apparently there must be a demand for it. Are people sharing these photos on social media or something? That's the only thing I can think of that would make sense.

It's a sequel to a game that came out in 1999 which was pretty successful (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pok%C3%A9mon_Snap).

The focus of the game is taking photos of Pokemon, but it's more involved than just that. It's really a puzzle game - where you need to work out what to do to get certain Pokemon to come out, or get them to do certain things to get better photos. (Getting Pikachu to surf is a stand out moment).

You can make any game sound pointless by describing it with only surface level detail like this - "Tetris is stupid, you just move squares to the bottom of the screen until they disappear", "Mario is stupid, you just jump up and down while moving to the right" and so on.

Honest question - would you say the gameplay of Pokemon Snap is as good as Mario 64 (which came out for the same system as Pokemon Snap) or Tetris?

"Gameplay" is not a scalar, and it's not a function of game alone - it's a function of the game and the player.

Never played Pokémon Snap, but if the gameplay resembles even a little the photography side-game of Beyond Good and Evil, or Subnautica, I'd probably find it fun to an extent. And beating Tetris gameplay, for me, is a pretty low bar. About the only thing I liked about it was the memorable music - as a kid, I never had patience to become good at it. The racing game on the same "100-in-1" handheld, now, that was another thing :).

Pokemon Snap has a lot of depth below the facade. It's an on-rails type game where your job is to take high quality photographs of Pokemon as you venture through the zones that game offers.

Crucially you cannot stop the cart you're on, it trudges forward at a mostly static pace through the level. This means you have to run through zones a couple times to learn the timings for certain pokemon to appear. At some point you unlock apples (lures) and rocks (activators) which you can use to influence the movements that pokemon make through those zones.

It culminates in things like seeing a Magikarp early on in a river rapids level, lining up your shot perfectly to hit it with a stone so it flies into a waterfall, that allows it to evolve and you'll want to get your camera pointed up for the dramatic moment it bursts back out through the waterfall. You get extra points for things like the pokemon being centered in the shot, them facing the camera, making specific movements, rare happenings (like evolutions, or using moves), etc.

So I'd say so, yeah. It lacks the grandiose appeal that Mario 64 had at the time but I'd say it beats out Tetris no matter what way you look at it.

I'd agree. Pokemon snap (N64) was a really awesome game, and I've never seen anything like it since. The really important bit is that it's not random at all. Everything is pre-scripted, and it's a puzzle to manipulate the game state to discover secret photo opportunities. Short, but highly memorable.

Back in the day you could take your cartridge to a blockbuster and print out your in game photos too (or something like that). That was the coolest thing in existence.

The new one looks like a pretty faithful sequel, even, pointlessly, drawing on some of the canon from the first game. I think it will great.

It also had a competitiveness to it by using a points system in photos, it was quite clever and it rated photos based on a wide set of criteria, including pose, framing, you'd get multipliers for having groups on the frame, it was quite unique for its time.

I loved that game, I'm glad they are coming out with a sequel but I outgrew Pokemon as the newer generations came and I am probably not as interested in the sequel, might try it out for the nostalgia factor.

Pokemon Snap is truly a testament to Nintendo's creativity in coming up with innovative gameplay, it leveraged their new 3D system in a cool way back then.

> It also had a competitiveness to it by using a points system in photos

And to top that off, there was an arcade version of the game (or possibly just the normal game in arcade stand, not sure anymore). We had one in the local Blockbuster, so kids could do a quick run while their parents were looking for a movie.

> There is a new Pokemon game coming out called "Pokemon Snap" where apparently the whole game consists of traveling through the game world and taking photos of Pokemon

At first I thought you were joking as if we were in the 90s again with this tamagotchi thread. People were equally confused by the original Pokémon snap, they said the exact same thing as you. Originally, kids were disappointed that the first 3D Pokémon game was a photography game, but it ended up being a memorable hit.

I played the hell out of that when I was 9 years old.

Nope, not joking. And I honestly wasn't trying to bash the game - I just watched some game play videos the other day trying to get a sense of whether it would make a good gift for my son, and didn't get it at all.

I had written it off, but I am tempted now to get it for my son (who adores Pokemon) and see if he likes it. Admittedly there are a lot of things I don't "get" until I see them through the eyes of a 6 year old.

There are various models released in Japan: https://toy.bandai.co.jp/series/tamagotchi/

Evangelion-themed tamagotchi is the weirdest thing but perhaps also a good marketing product - tho, not sure how the series holds in Japan nowadays

I'm a Japanese and I haven't seen kids playing Tamagotchi for years.

I remember the Tamagotchi being for both sexes, but popularity among males at my school dropped after the release of Digimon,which was heavily marketed to males due to the 'battle' aspect

From personal experience I remember that majority of kids had these here in Poland in the end of 90s and early 2000s but the quality of tama egg as we called these (not knowing it was a tautology), varied. Some richer kids had the original tamagotchi while most of us got bootleg devices sold on the market by merchants from Ukraine (who also were selling bootleg copies of SNES along with cartridges - majority of these were "9999 in One" games, sometimes even taking shape of original Playstation) or in newspaper, toy stores. Bootleg copies weren't lasting long - the common issue was with ZEBRA connectors on LCD that were prone to failing if device was dropped and that happen a lot. I had luck to find some Bandai branded tamagotchi but now I doubt it was original - I did tried to look for any info about it but no luck.

Despite if it was original or not, we had fun - two classmates were really happy about their 28 in 1 type of devices, where they both pick gray aliens. Later on I had some bootleg 8 in 1 device that I really liked. We also were wearing these on ribbons around neck instead of pockets, since devices had a clock feature.

Edit: forgot to mention that there were also dating-sim tamagotchi-like device [1], not sure but probably aiming at teenagers/adults and one that had a more "natural" looking pictures of baby/kid [2]

[1] - https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-W8DZLytNPQw/Ujv5_PYCoUI/AAAAAAAAC...

[2] - https://orig10.deviantart.net/e9bc/f/2017/221/7/f/babybye2_e...

good riddance, kids today have the pleasure of modern entertainment https://i.imgur.com/7SNVCKH.png

Does it also download 40GB of updates the first time you turn it on? :).

I of course mean it as a cheap swing at modern consoles. It dawns on me that kids today won't experience the same thing I did when I was growing up - the ability to just turn on a console at a friend, drop a cartridge, play a few rounds of Contra or Mortal Kombat, and then go do something else. Or the experience of unboxing the new PlayStation, plugging it in, and just playing one of the games that came with it.

I'm sure a lot of Christmas evenings were ruined in the last few years, when parents and kids first discovered post-install updates and overloaded update servers...

That's still a thing though, on smartphones. They're the closest thing you'll get to instant-on games. Flicking between apps is a lot faster too.

When I was a kid Tamagotchis we’re all the rage. My parents weren’t exactly in a position to spoil me so I never had one while a good deal of my friends did. And then I learned about this. I could not believe my ears when I heard about it because how is it fair that I can’t afford one of these while others somewhere else in the world get to just throw them out? I know it’s silly but yeah that was a moment that really stuck with me.

Were these really ever expensive? Maybe they only reached my part of the world when it’d become cheap plastic. At least I certainly don’t remember ever considering them expensive (though for a child nothing is cheap).

$17.99.

That's about $34 in today's money.

It still represents more 3 hours of work at the 1997 minimum wage...

Which is, taking inflation into account, $29.69 in 2021 dollars.

https://www.quora.com/How-much-did-a-Tamagotchi-cost-in-1996

https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/

Yeah, that was definitely an expensive toy as far as my family was concerned. Still kind of is for what it is tbh.

My parents either scoffed at the price or were unable to find the name brand version. I received a knock-off version for Christmas which, if I remember correctly, looked like a small dog sleeping in a basket. The dog was part of a lid which flipped open to reveal the screen and buttons.

I remember being happy with it, but under some circumstances it played alarm sounds. I don't remember the cause, but one day it went off like a fire alarm and I wasn't allowed to bring it to school after that.

I grew up in Ukraine. I don’t remember what they cost back then but post Soviet Ukraine got a lot of Western goods at a premium.

Does anyone else remember putting the plastic tab into the tamagotchi and pulling it out repeatedly in the hope of glitching the device into giving you a powerful monster? I definitely succeeded more than once, I would love to know the explanation of why it worked!

The tab is there to disconnect the battery while the toy is in it's package.

The battery is a standard button cell type and there is a little metal spring that touches the battery to complete the circuit. The plastic tab acts as an insulator between the battery surface, and the conductive spring.

Pulling the plastic tab out may cause the spring to bounce a couple of times on the battery surface, effectively closing and breaking the circuit a couple of times before it settles. 'Bounce' is a well-known phenomenon in electrical engineering, and designing 'debouncing' circuits and software is common practice.

The problem here is that due to capacitive charges the CPU in the Tamagotchi may not fully reset during the short power-loss times when the battery spring bounces. This is known as a 'brownout' event. A brownout may cause memory corruption, which makes behavior of the software unpredictable. It is also possible that the RAM resets, but the CPU doesn't, this causes the software to run on garbage data as the memory initialization doesn't happen.

Since the state of the software (so effectively the 'soul' of your virtual pet) is stored in RAM, corrupting the RAM influences the state of the virtual pet. It is typical for RAM to flip it's bits to the '1' state on brownout/reset, thus suddenly your pet now has all values set to its maximum (99 age, 99 health, etc).

Normally, a reset circuit is placed in the electronic design of a computer, that holds the CPU in reset for a short time during power-up. And brownout detection may be implemented to prevent the CPU from memory corruption. But since Tamagotchis were designed to be as cheap as possible to produce, I highly doubt there was any reset circuitry or brownout detection.

Whats that game.com device in the 1997 Argos catalog shot? Amazing to see a domain name in a 1997 ad, and then the device is for checking email! So cool for the time.

Wikipedia has the details: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game.com

"Accessing the Internet required the use of an Internet cartridge and a modem, neither of which were included with the console. Email messages could be read and sent on the Game.com using the Internet cartridge, and the Game.com supported text-only web browsing through Internet service providers. Email messages could not be saved to the Game.com's internal memory. In addition to a Game.com-branded 14.4 kbit/s modem, Tiger also offered an Internet service provider through Delphi that was made to work specifically with the Game.com."

This is so nostalgic. As a child, my Tamagotchi felt like a real pet to me, and it really was heart wrenching when they passed away.

Meanwhile, your neopets haven't died, they're just still starving :(

My Nintendog is still out there somewhere, famished.

I wonder if there was a pattern or analysis of tamagochi sales success by country.

I certainly read about Tamagochi growing up...but i hardly saw one or heard of friends owning one.

Curious if these prospered in countries with free trade agreements with Japan? Or just the right distributor? Or something else entirely?

They were hugely popular in the UK, for a short time in the late 90s. I was in 6th form at the time (so 16-18) and everyone seemed to have one.

I was actually surprised that Namco didn't release an official Tamagotchi app (or it completely passed me by).

They did have a serious of apps under the Tamagotchi Life brand for a while[1]. There hasn't been an app in a while though; right now they've mostly been focused locally where Tamagotchi's are used as promotional tie-ins and physical accessories (e.g. the most recent Evangelion and Demon Slayer themed releases.

[1] https://tamagotchi.fandom.com/wiki/Tamagotchi_L.i.f.e.

During my childhood years, I can't afford to buy a Tamagochi. I always wonder how it does feel to own a virtual pet during my childhood years. I will love to try it if there is a modern-day counterpart of the immersive and enjoyable game.

Fascinating hardware details! http://tama.loociano.com/

Still looking for old Tamagotchi "Connection"s, with the infrared connectivity. Those were fantastic.

One day when mahcines will take over they will show this to other machines to explain how cruel to them humans were ...

Gang gang

Onward.

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