Twenty-One Days

That’s how long my Tamagotchi survived before it went back to whatever pixel planet it came from. Or maybe it just died—at the time, and even now, I’m not entirely sure the game wanted you to know the difference. What I remember is carrying it everywhere in 1997, feeding it between classes, panicking when the beeping started during a test, and learning for the first time that caring for something and actually keeping it alive were two entirely different skills.

They brought them back. The Tamagotchi 4U launched in Japan in the summer of 2014, priced around sixty euros, available in pink, white, blue, and purple. The new version connected to smartphones, accepted NFC updates at special stations loaded with food and outfits and toys, and could communicate with other units held nearby—all things that would have felt like science fiction to the kid anxiously poking at an eight-pixel blob in a classroom in 1997.

Whether the added connectivity made them more loveable or just more like everything else we already owned is a question I don’t think anyone answered satisfyingly. I never bought one. The nostalgia was real, but nostalgia is mostly about the age you were, not the object. You can’t go back to being nine by spending sixty euros. The Tamagotchi knew that. It went home anyway.