About 28 years ago, on November 23, 1996, a new concept of portable ‘digital pet’ game console appeared. This is ‘Tamagotchi’, a game console released by Bandai in Japan, and this game console has taken the world by storm, gaining sensational popularity. Even now, the term ‘Tamagotchi’ has become synonymous with digital pets, to the extent that even people who don’t know anything about games understand it.
The original ‘Tamagotchi’ consisted of a mini game console with a small black-and-white LCD screen with a resolution of only 32×16 and three small buttons. It was shaped like a cute egg that you could hold tightly in your hand.
When you run the game console, a small egg appears, and when you break the egg, a cute, unidentifiable animal pops out. A digital animal with an elongated snout and blinking eyes may have had poor graphics, but it couldn’t have been cuter at the time. After a certain amount of time, this animal would poop, beg to play, act cute, or even sleep. If you don’t take good care of yourself to maintain your health, you could get sick or even die.
So, when the signal came, I had to quickly go in and take care of it carefully, including cleaning up the poop, taking it for a walk sometimes, and buying it delicious food. Although it was a simple structure with only simple graphics and a few action patterns, people were crazy about this ‘Tamagotchi’.
The concept of raising a virtual pet was very fresh at the time, and as I raised this Tamagotchi, it went through its own evolution and turned into my own pet, so I was interested in what kind of animal it would turn into.
It was even possible to link Tamagotchis with other friends and breed them to get new baby Tamagotchis. It was also fun to see how much each other’s Tamagotchis were raised with friends and compare what type of Tamagotchi each person was raising. The fact that it was designed cutely and felt like a fashion product for girls is also worth checking as a success point.
Perhaps because of its sensational popularity, according to Japan’s Asahi Shimbun, Tamagotchi generated sales of 46 billion yen (about 405 billion won) a year after its release in 1996. Over the next two and a half years, more than 40 million units were sold worldwide, and even now, 20 years later, Bandai continues to release new types of products every two to three years.
Tamagotchis, which have a much better appearance than before, giving the feeling of a jewel box, equipped with a much more colorful set of animals and advanced network functions, have appeared in the world one by one, and many Tamagotchis that have been combined with various popular IPs (intellectual properties) have also appeared. . Through these various developments, Bandai announced in March last year that cumulative worldwide sales of ‘Tamagotchi’ exceeded 91 million units.
The popularity of Tamagotchi also had a great impact on the gaming industry. Although games in the training simulation genre existed before, they were not in the form of Tamagotchi. For example, ‘Princess Maker’, released in 1991, was a game about raising a daughter, but it was a high-quality game in itself and was not connected to reality.
However, Tamagotchi, although crude, was an early example of connecting virtual animals with reality. It was a game console that blurred the boundaries between the virtual world and the real world, but also allowed people to experience it through its popularization.
In fact, Adam Crowley, an English professor at Husson University located in Bangor, USA, called the Tamagotchi ▲the beginning of continuous play that cannot be stopped even when the device is turned off ▲the first game console marketed to girls ▲the device for those who know nothing about games. An analysis was made that it was a gaming machine that showed enough accessibility to attract them.
So what games are directly influenced by Tamagotchi? Do you remember the Nintendo DSL that took Korea by storm in 2007? One of the super hit titles of the portable game console NDSL, which became an issue when it was advertised by the most popular actors at the time, such as Jang Dong-gun and Lee Na-young, was ‘Nintendocs’.
This ‘Nintendogs’ is an extension of Tamagotchi, a game where you raise cute puppies using two screens, a touch screen, and a microphone.
You could give commands directly through the microphone, and it was also possible to touch the dog’s fur or scratch its chin using the touch pen. The cute puppy’s movements were just as adorable as the actual puppy.
Nintendogs is extremely popular worldwide, and has sold 23.96 million copies worldwide, ranking second in sales among all NDSL games. This figure surpasses the popular games like ‘Pokemon’ and ‘Mario Kart’, so you can see how much popularity it enjoyed.
Furthermore, the new attributes of the game created by Tamagotchi have continued to this day, and have had a great influence on mobile training simulation games and have been incorporated into general games as well. It would be difficult to say that the current mobile idle RPGs and healing games did not have the influence of Tamagotchi in their development.
If you turn your head and look for a moment, you can see that various training and healing games have been released, such as ‘Cat and Soup’, ‘Street Cat Story’, ‘Mini Pet’, and ‘Little Friends’. Most of these games feel like extensions of Tamagotchi, and play a good role as digital friends, providing comfort and healing to our hearts. If not, there may be people who enjoy playing idle RPGs in a fantasy world and develop and nurture their characters.
In the process of enjoying these games and gaining pleasure, it would be good to think at least once, ‘Ah, the Tamagotchi of that time has developed in this way and is giving me this happiness.’
Source: www.donga.com
