The Rise of Virtual Pets (Tamagotchi, Digimon, and NEOPETS?!)

0:00 pets are fun right they're loyal companions that trust you love you and emotionally support you like my nana what a cutie comment down below if you think nane is a cutie uh anyways uh sometimes you can't take your little friends everywhere with you or worse the place you live doesn't allow pets so what do you do then easy you just need to find a pet that will fit anywhere a pet that isn't confined by the physical realities of our world a pet that just might be virtual people from the tamagotchi to the digimon to the gigapad virtual pets have been leaving us tiny pixelated poops to clean for around 25 years their popularity and

0:47 styles have fluctuated over the years but they've remained our loyal technological companions nonetheless and they earned a loyal fan base thanks to their tireless efforts but they haven't always lived in plastic eggs the very first virtual pet wasn't quite as portable as we've come to expect in fact you had to use a desktop computer to play them kids let's go back to the longest days of 1995 that's the year that gave birth to the first virtual pet to really make splash dogs no not dogs with an s dogs with a z a fun fact i guess back in the 90s we ended a lot of things with z's from our pro wrestling tag teams to our rmb groups to our anime sequels i i can't explain it you know it's just

1:32 it was just cooler that way i guess uh dogs was developed by pf magic a company that has recently released balls also with a z for various systems turns out dogs are a little more palatable than um balls and the game lets you choose your personal dock from several different breeds from there you could raise them groom them play with them and generally take care of them a year later pf magic would create cats which was the same concept except you know with the cats dogs and cats titles were pretty successful and a few years down the line after pf magic had been acquired by the learning company they've even developed babies and yes it is as weird as it sounds but there's one major issue with dogs cats and babies

2:18 their computer games and in 1995 that probably meant you were playing with your virtual pets in your house dogs cats and babies were the first attempts to scratch that virtual pet itch but to advance digital pets would have to get portable enter akihiro yokoi yokoi was a developer who had previously worked at toy developer bandai then became the president of wiz a toy manufacturing company and then submitted a proposal for this revolutionary product you see one day yokoi was watching tv when something caught his eye and tugged at his heartstrings a commercial where a boy wasn't allowed to take his pet turtle on a family trip after enjoying this nightmare vision of a turtle's vacation he had an idea what if there was a pet

3:03 that you could take with you on a trip literally any trip so he and a few colleagues who was working at bandai set to work on what would eventually become the tamagotchi and if you ever wondered where the hell the name tamagotchi comes from well i'm gonna try and tell you some sources say combines the japanese word for egg tamago with japanese words for watch watchi that watchi comes from an original tamagotchi concept that never saw the light of day see at first you coined this crew envisioned tamagotchi as something you'd wear like a watch but the idea was quickly scrapped other sources say that it's a combination of tamago and tomodachi which is the japanese word friend so egg friend which is you know what all delicious eggs are honestly anyway but that first word

3:48 egg is important for a lot of reasons not only were the original tamagotchi devices egg shaped and not only are tamagotchis birth from eggs but their egg shape has some lore behind it too well according to a story that yokoyani's collaborators would eventually concoct the tamagotchis are an alien species that landed on earth in order to study life here one problem though earth's atmosphere is garbage so they had no chance for survival wait is this tamagotchi or this real life anyways luckily for the tamagotchis they were found by a scientist and his assistant who built the little egg-shaped protective cases around them thus giving them a way to survive earth toxic ass air and that my friends is why we carry around tamagotchis

4:34 in tiny egg-shaped cases well um this sounds like a multi-million dollar brand if you said no then the folks at bandai 1995 agrees with you they just weren't convinced that they could market a glorified veterinarian simulator now why in the hell would anyone want a pet that you had to clean up and take care of isn't all that work what turns people off of real pets according to your koi that's what makes them so appealing only after you put in the work to take care of your pets do you start to love them that's right the more you empty that little box the more adorable those kids become it's not the most solid logic but it's logic it could also be toxoplasmosis yeah google that one it's basically kind of like parasites that infect your brain

5:20 and make you love cats i'm not even kidding this isn't a bit you can check this out right now for a moment it seemed like tamagotchis was never gonna hatch but luckily bandai employee aki maida saw a promise in the digital pets she figured that with some tweaking the tamagotchi could be a hit and so maina and bandai worked up a few prototypes and she hit the streets of shibuya testing the product out on teenage girls who would be the toys primary demographic they loved it and might have watched their specific reaction to it noting which details they preferred and which they seem to be okay with changing and so after perfecting the tamagotchi in every way imaginable bandai would release them in november of 1996 to say that they were huge would be an

6:06 understatement six months later over 5 million tamagotchi units would be sold around the world and by 2017 over 80 million have been bought at the height of their success in north america at least 15 devices were being sold every single second high sales meant shortages though and an actual tamagotchi black market emerged with the toys being sold from anywhere from 20 to 60 times their store price which was about 70 dollars the franchise would make hundreds of millions of dollars and its quick success would inspire bandai would come up with an idea for an alternate brand of virtual pets digimon if you want the history behind that glorious franchise check out our video about it by clicking on the box that i assume would appear on you know on the screen i don't know

6:52 exactly i always forget i think it's in the corner yeah but tamagotchi and digimon and dogs weren't alone tiger electronics famed creators of the furby and those little lcd games that you got when your parents didn't want to shell out for a game boy we're busy creating the gigapet in may of 1997 for 10 maybe five dollars less than the tamagotchi though i'm sure that's you know just a pricing coincidence the giga pets was popular and they were expanded in a variety of ways throughout 1998. first there were the gigapets plus which could house more than one animal and feature titles like giga circus gigafarm and in the time with a movie that you haven't thought about in 20 years small soldiers shouts out to small soldiers i had the vhs when i was a little kid i poured that out was a good

7:37 movie good movie there were also giga fighters which took the exact same idea the propelled digimon which is what if this cute toy was angry and for boys and gave us products based on things like hulk hogan and the movie batman and robin uh fans of franchises that were destined for financial ruin surely ate well that ear on one hand you could train and heal a tiny hollywood hulk hogan and in the other you could feed and i'm not kidding bathe tiny mr freeze all that digital sparring definitely makes you digitally sweaty apparently meanwhile we'd get giga pets based on yoda raptar and even babe from the movie babe now you could just call the game pig and not pay for the babe license but i believe we should put some respect on

8:24 babe's name anyhow the to cap off 1998 america got a virtual pet based on a series that was you know just just kind of popular around the world you know pokemon the pokemon pikachu was both a virtual pet and a step counter and with it you could watch pikachu eat sleep brush his teeth and if you didn't walk around with it enough hate your guts it's like pokemon go pokemon go go walk outside however despite this acceleration in toys and tie-ins 1998 was not a great year for virtual pet sales having peaked in 1996 and 1997 1998 saw a sales drop of almost 80 a good deal of this decline had to do with many schools making an effort to

9:11 ban the pets seeing them as a distraction and if they're banned from schools a place where kids spend most of their days and they need constant interaction throughout the day to simply survive why would parents buy them and though 1999 would see the birth of the extremely popular neopet sites one that was getting around 600 000 daily page views a little over a month virtual pets claimed their place on the family pc once again and the heyday of the tiny critter machine that you walked around with was over even though portable virtual pets still exist today and the fan community around tamagotchi though smaller than it was in 1997 is dedicated and thriving there are discord servers and websites devoted to modding tamagotchi with hackers editing them in ways that will change them visually and

9:57 alter their habits and even keep them from dying bandai also continues to create new versions of the pets even releasing special commemorative edition tamagotchis on their 20th anniversary these days the advanced graphics and more intricate designs look like a far cry from the simple eggs and blobs of 1996 but the same goal remains feed them you play with them you keep them from deposit of their own poop rinse and repeat and now your tamagotchi don't even have to be alone thanks to the magic of technology you can make your tamagotchi connect you can even play tamagotchi matchmaker and have your pets fall in love get married and potentially reproduce in a tamagotchi app called my tamagotchi forever you can even work to get your pet a

10:43 career based on the skill it has though that seems a little cruel you know you're really gonna make your little cute pets go out and get a job in this economy but why were they ever popular at all that's a question that we haven't really dealt with yet and i think to provide an answer we have to go back back again to the mid 90s and look at the climate in which these pocket buddies were born the mid 90s were a tumultuous period for japan its post-world war ii urbanization had been rapid creating an economic powerhouse to rival any around the world but increasingly driving people towards cities and in cities having a pet is a little harder or a lot harder depending on where you live there's often no backyards for your pets to poop in only crowded streets to walk them on and

11:29 if you have a cat chances are you live eat sleep and bathe within 10 feet of their litter box sure plenty of urban pet owners make it work but when you can't that's where virtual pets come in the mid 90s also saw japan plunging into a period known as the lost decade in which a terrifying economic recession staggered the nation's titanic progress and ruined the dreams of many that had aspired for success and as it happens with any major recession scores of people felt listless and well lonely they were unable to feel like they were being taken care of or able to take care of others it's the age where the term hikikomori was first popularized to refer to a demographic that feeling homeless about their prospects withdrew from society all together combine that social enough

12:16 with what's commonly called urban loneliness in which you struggle for connection despite being surrounded by people and what do you get a whole bunch of people who could use some virtual snuggles from digital pets tamagotchi would probably have had a wide appeal no matter when they debuted but they just so happened to come at the perfect time and despite the lost decade being specific to japan the need to fight off loneliness is universal in may 1997 just three weeks after the tamagotchi was released in the united states the new york times interviewed american kids and adults who had bought the toy they found that people had become pretty attached to their little egg friends children wept over the deaths of a creature that spent just a few days trying to nurture and around the same time one japanese tamagotchi owner

13:01 argued that if you truly loved your creature you'd have a problem with resetting it after it died one woman was so obsessed with her digital companion that she crashed her car while trying to keep her pet alive this has got to be the ultimate sign that people make meaningful connections with the virtual pets they care about its mortality to further this point one tamagotchi message board hosts memorial threads of users paying tribute to the virtual pets they loved for a more analog experience grieving pet owners can mail their pets to an actual pet cemetery in southern england which receives and enters tamagotchis from around the world that'll make a weird um stephen king book that's why virtual pets remain because we'll always need that connection whether it's from our buddies our family

13:48 our dogs our cats or our little egg friends and sometimes it's nice to have a pal you can bring with you anywhere alright everyone that was the history of virtual pets thank you so much for checking out this video and tuning in and let me know in the comments below if you have any great tamagotchi stories check out our other videos please subscribe and uh see you later go pet your virtual pets check on your neopets actually um yeah definitely do that i think my i think my little t-rex neopets is dead now rip