The Tamagotchi is back — as an app.
If you were alive in the mid-90s, you know what a Tamagotchi is, even if you didn’t actually own one. The small egg-shaped virtual pet, which doubled as a keychain, could be found in the pockets of kids across the world. It was big — big like Furby, Beanie Babies and Tickle-Me Elmo. On 14 January, the Tamagotchi L.I.F.E. — Love Is Fun Everywhere — app hit Google Play as a free download. It works much like the toy did: you’ve got a small, ink-blot of a virtual pet to feed, bathe, entertain and generally keep happy and healthy. Everything you had to do with the original toy, you have to do here, including picking up its digital poop.
As with the old toy, this is achieved by tapping three unlabelled buttons in the app’s “toy view,” which recreates the eggshell interface on your Android phone. The bleeping and blooping noises of the original are annoyingly reproduced, alerting you to your pet’s wants and needs. And, like the actual toy, the Tamagotchi has constant needs. In the last couple hours of using the app, I’m already getting irked at its persistent calls for attention. Ignore your Tamagotchi long enough and it will die and you’ll have to start over with a new pet. I’m already considering starving mine.
One new feature is an “app view” that brings your pet into a full-screen view and dumps the three-button controls in favour of tappable icons. If you lovingly take care of your pet, you’ll unlock in-app rewards such as new backgrounds, new pets to raise and even new digital renditions of the plastic shells the old toys were shipped in. For now, the app — which is built by Namco Bandai, the same company that produced the toys of yesteryear — is only available on phones and tablets running Google’s Android operating system, but an iOS version is reportedly under development.