Tamacrazy

Christmas time is here by golly, and with it comes a swarm of electronic toys. Although I have little appetite for "big", contemporary video games, I do tend to be unhealthily attracted by vintage-styled gadgets, with monochrome graphics, the kind that beeps instead of playing orchestra music.

Tamagotchi is one of those gadgets, and I was surprised to find new ones on sales in an ordinary shop and not somewhere inside a thrift store. That’s because this thing was first released at the end of the 90s. The version I show here is dated from 2021 - it is a new edition of the original game (2nd generation).

Tamagotchi is an interactive game where you own a virtual pet that lives from a few days to a few weeks inside his little egg. As an owner, you need to feed it, wash it, play with it, attend to it when it is sick, scold it when it’s naughty, and turn its little light off at night.

And this is it ! Even if this toy is on 24 hours a day, it does only ask for a very minimal attention, compared to what our smartphones ask from us. Back in those olden days, the arrival of Tamagotchi led teachers to worry that pupils may become unfocused due to having this toy constantly on with them. Compare with today where we send kids to school with a smartphone constantly connected to the internet and social networks... Well, it was another era.

Personally, I have always liked this toy. First of all because it’s everything except another violent video game - the unique goal of this toy is to take care of a little animal - but also, now that I am older and more technically-oriented, because it is a very minimalistic contraption - the software runs on a 4-bit CPU at a clock speed of 32 kiloherts (!), it only has several hundred bytes of RAM (!!). It’s really a beautiful work of digital low-tech, low-resource code. And it also consumes extremely little energy - the thing goes with a single button battery for months. I would even go as far as saying it’s an ecological toy - but of course, it is even more ecological not to buy plastic gadgets containing a battery in the first place...