The Tamagotchi Was an Alarm Clock With a Face

Pressing A and C together on a first-generation Tamagotchi started the game over. According to the summary on Wikipedia, that was the whole mechanism of resurrection: a dead pet showed a ghost and a headstone in Japanese versions, an angel in English ones, and two buttons later there was a new egg.

That detail explains a lot about what the toy was, and what it was not.

What did the toy actually ask of its owner?

Akihiro Yokoi of WiZ and Aki Maita of Bandai released it in Japan on November 23, 1996, and in the United States on May 1, 1997. It had three meters, hunger, happiness and discipline, and a short list of chores: feed the meal or the snack, play the game, clean up droppings, give medicine when the skull icon appeared, scold when the pet called for attention without needing anything. Overfeed it snacks and it got sick. Ignore the droppings and it got sick. Ignore the sickness and it died.

What the toy produced, mostly, was interruptions. The pet called for attention; the owner stopped what they were doing. In the first two releases a pet could die in under half a day without care, so the owner’s day had a clock in it that the owner had not set. The original could be paused only by going into the clock-setting menu. Wikipedia’s summary says later models replaced a pause function with a paid babysitting feature. For a schoolchild, that meant small appointments scattered through the day.

This is the sense in which a Tamagotchi was an alarm clock with a face. A regular alarm announces a time. The Tamagotchi announced a need and then kept score of whether you responded.

Why did schools ban it?

Because the schedule it imposed ran straight into the school’s. Children brought them to class, teachers complained of disruption and distraction, and many schools banned them, as the Wikipedia summary reports of press coverage at the time. Bandai sold 400,000 in 1996, about 10 million by July 1997 and nearly 40 million worldwide by spring 1998. The Ig Nobel committee gave Yokoi and Maita the 1997 prize in economics, which Improbable Research says honored them for diverting millions of person-hours of work into the husbandry of virtual pets. A joke prize, and — as descriptions go — a precise one.

The same coverage records children burying their dead pets, and urban legends of far worse consequences that the Wikipedia article itself presents as unverified. The grief reports are worth taking seriously: attachment was the actual stake. The pet could not retaliate or shame anyone. It simply stopped.

What were the stakes, and who could see them?

Three things carried the weight. First, the loss of an attachment the child had built over days. Second, the interruption schedule, which turned attention into a daily cost. Third, a score: how long the pet had lived.

Missing from that list is anyone else. A neglected Tamagotchi died in a pocket or a desk. The owner knew, perhaps a sibling knew, and the ghost on the screen faced nobody but the person who had caused it. When the grief faded, a two-button restart cost nothing, and a restart that costs nothing is a stake that expires. This is an argument, not a measurement: nobody here has data on how long children kept caring across multiple restarts.

How does that compare with other virtual-consequence apps?

The same bargain, a fictional penalty and a private audience, turns up in current habit software, from the hit-point penalties of a gamified habit tracker to the sad-owl notifications of a language app.

The Tamagotchi did one thing those later apps learned from: it made absence expensive in a way that arrived on its schedule, not the owner’s. What it left out is the other half. Nobody saw.

Where a witness changes the picture

DontSnooze takes the opposite trade. A missed morning does not kill a pet; it puts the miss in front of friends who know you. The cost of that choice is real. Friends are more forgiving than a toy with a fixed rule, can look away, and can get bored of watching. A Tamagotchi never did any of those things.

A pet’s stakes depend on the owner’s own fondness; a friend who sees the result brings stakes of their own.

Quick facts

When was the Tamagotchi released, and how many were sold? It launched in Japan on November 23, 1996 and in the United States on May 1, 1997. According to Wikipedia’s summary of press figures, Bandai sold 400,000 units in 1996, about 10 million by July 1997, and nearly 40 million worldwide by spring 1998.

Who created the Tamagotchi? Akihiro Yokoi of the company WiZ and Aki Maita of Bandai. They shared the 1997 Ig Nobel Prize in economics, which Improbable Research describes as given for diverting millions of person-hours of work into the husbandry of virtual pets.

Could a Tamagotchi really die within hours? In the first two releases, reported accounts say a pet could die in under half a day without care. Causes of death included neglect, sickness from uncleaned droppings or too many snacks, and old age. Japanese versions showed a ghost and headstone on death, English versions an angel, and pressing A and C together restarted the game, per Wikipedia’s summary.

Is a virtual pet an accountability tool? Only a narrow one. It creates a schedule and an attachment, but nobody else sees the neglect, and the original could be restarted with a two-button press. Accountability in the usual sense needs a witness; the Tamagotchi supplied pressure without one.