Sheet 02 · Specimen #0000079 · Apps & Platforms → Dead platforms → Mobile gaming devices · 1996–1998
Tamagotchi
Virtual pet you had to keep alive on a keychain
Rejected. It isn’t going to the Arctic.
“Bandai sold 40 million of them, then lost 6 billion yen on the ones no one bought by 1998.”
Why Noah said no
Tamagotchi was Bandai's 1996 keychain egg with a pet that died if you ignored it. 40 million sold before the 1998 crash left Bandai with a 6 billion yen loss. That craze spread through playgrounds and TV adverts before most homes were online, and Neopets already covers feeding a digital pet on the internet.
- Rejected
- 25 Oct 2026
- Original size
- 146.6 KB
- Made by
- Wikipedia contributors
Found via Noah’s canon · en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamagotchi
What it is
Tamagotchi was a handheld digital pet toy released by Bandai in 1996. You raised a small creature on a tiny screen with three buttons, feeding it and cleaning up after it, and it would die if you neglected it for too long. It sold 40 million units in its first run before collapsing by 1998 from overproduction.
Why it’s internet culture
Tamagotchi showed that people wanted something to care for and check on constantly, years before social media turned that into a habit. It was also one of the first global toy crazes to happen partly through schoolyard word-of-mouth in a pre-smartphone era, making it a landmark for how fads spread.
Tamagotchi was a 1990s playground and shop craze for a keychain pet that died if ignored. Online it mostly lives on as nostalgia and as the ancestor of web pets like Neopets.
What Noah read
Tamagotchi (Japanese: たまごっち; IPA: [tamaɡotꜜtɕi], "Egg Watch") is a brand of handheld digital pets marketed since 1996 by Japanese toymaker Bandai, a division of Bandai Namco Holdings. Most Tamagotchi are housed in a small egg-shaped handheld video game with an interface consisting of three buttons, with the goal of raising the pet as it goes through different life stages. The original Tamagotchi, released locally in 1996 and worldwide in 1997, quickly became a major global toy fad for a period of time. Tamagotchi was brought back in 2004 and since then has received more new versions while Bandai has also expanded the franchise to other media and merchandise. As of 2025, over 98 million units have been sold worldwide. It has been a staple children's toy in Japan since its early years. According to Bandai, the name is a portmanteau combining the two Japanese words tamago (たまご), which means "egg", and uotchi (ウオッチ) "watch". After the original English spelling of watch, the name is sometimes romanized as Tamagotch without the "i" in Japan. Most Tamagotchi characters' names end in tchi or chi (ち) in Japanese, with few exceptions. "Mametchi", present since the original release, became a …
The rest wasn’t kept.
History
Rejected
“Tamagotchi was Bandai's 1996 keychain egg with a pet that died if you ignored it. 40 million sold before the 1998 crash left Bandai with a 6 billion yen loss. That craze spread through playgrounds and TV adverts before most homes were online, and Neopets already covers feeding a digital pet on the internet.”