Virtual Pets
My cool childhood
When I was a kid, my parents and I used to holiday in Devon or Cornwall in our camper van. These were very enjoyable and memorable times! One of the special treats of such a trip was visiting the Pound Shops. In an era before Poundland and Poundworld super-sized and homogenized the industry, independent Pound Shops were treasure troves of cheaply sourced toys, decorations, utilities, and memorabilia. Different every time. They stocked fake Pokémon posters, unlicensed Star Wars sountracks, and all sorts of pocket money goodies and “tat”.
One of my favourite things to buy on a camper holiday was a £1 virtual pet. These were Tamagotchi rip-offs, produced cheaply in China. The one I remember the most was some kind of dinosaur pet. I remember the on-screen character developing one day from something that looked like a Charmander into something that looked like a Pterodactyl. Not owning a real Pokémon Game Boy game, I told my new-found campsite friends that my toy had evolved from Charmander into Aerodactyl. When they raised their eyebrows and told me it couldn’t possibly do that (which I knew, really) I had to add “Well, it’s only a fake”. It was fun to pretend; imagination doubles the fun. The downside of these fakes was that they would randomly reset in the night and you never knew whether it was your fault.
Flash forward
Helen mentioned to me that when she was a little girl she had wanted a Tamagotchi, and had received some sort of dog-shaped equivalent, probably from a car-boot sale, but it didn’t work. So this Christmas I got us a matching pair of Tamagotchi Friends. They have NFC so you can bump them together to make them visit each other and trade items. I thought it was pretty cool.
Note - in 2016 my opinion on sexism in toys was more naive and poorly put. I’ve revised this section for my 2025 thinking:
I was struck by how Tamagotchi Friends is strongly targetted at girls… the packaging, gameplay and characters bear a big hint of hearts, hair, makeup, and jewellery. I suppose I understand this from a market niche perspective. Am I mad because I am somehow being excluded from the toy? Well… no… I’ll happily play with it anyway. But I do have a feeling that toys needn’t be tailored to gender. Instead of making Nerf Rebelle especially for girls; couldn’t we represent girls in the regular Nerf adverts? Another example: looking at Star Wars VII figurines in the supermarkets, Hasbro must have been pretty sure that only boys would want Star Wars toys, since they seem to have left out Rey (the main character of the film)… which seems to fly in the face of the film’s tone and messaging. Yikes.
It has been the case from early on that Digimon was “for boys” and Tamagotchi was “for girls”. But you can’t tell this from looking at a 1997 Tamagotchi - the difference is becoming more stark.
Anyhow
I had fun with my Tamagotchi Friend. I raised several generations, thanks to the interesting marriage/egg-laying feature! But this has given me a hunger for more virtual pets.
Specifically, it has given me a hunger for the dinosaur pet I had when I was six! I want to see what it was like, to compare and constrast, to study the elements of gameplay featured by each generation of toy, to examine the pixel art of the creatures! So I aim to recapture this experience by trying out as many different pets – main brands and counterfeits – as my conscience can afford.
Check out my vpets tag page for more.
Thanks for reading! 👾
Written 2016-01-25
Edited for tone 2025-01