For most of its life, Tamagotchi was a solo thing. One egg-shaped device, one pet, one quiet routine: feed it, clean up after it, watch it grow, and wave goodbye when it leaves. The Meets and On era changed that in a way nobody quite saw coming. Starting with the Tamagotchi Meets in Japan in 2018, and the Tamagotchi On around the world from 2019, the little pet stopped being something you raised alone. It became something you raised together.
The headline feature was marriage and genes. These devices had colour screens and wireless connections, and the game revolved around getting your Tamagotchi ready to find a partner. When two pets clicked, over a real wireless link with another person's device, they could marry and leave an egg. The child grew up as a new generation, but it was no blank slate. It inherited traits from both parents: the shape of its ears, its eyes, its colouring, even its personality. Raise a few generations and your family tree started to look like yours, with quirks that passed down and mixed in ways you could not fully predict.
That one idea changed what the device was for. A classic Tamagotchi was a private routine you could enjoy entirely on your own. The Meets and On pointed the same routine outward. To really get the most out of it, you wanted other people with devices: to connect at meetups, to marry your Tamagotchi to theirs, to compare the funny ears your latest kid just inherited from someone else's line. And people did. Real meetups happened, rows of grown-ups and kids pressing devices together; parents raised family lines alongside their children; collectors picked one up just to see what all the fuss was about. For a few years, the egg was as much a reason to gather as it was a pet to care for.
The era also had its own quiet rebranding story. What launched in Japan as the Tamagotchi Meets in 2018 reached the rest of the world as the Tamagotchi On in 2019, the same family of ideas under a name built for a wider audience. Fans used the two names almost interchangeably, and even after production wound down in the early 2020s, both still turn up in collections and community spaces.
Looking back, the Meets and On years matter less for the hardware and more for what they proved: a Tamagotchi is more fun when someone else has one too. The devices are quiet now, but the idea they carried, pets with parents, families, and inherited histories, moved straight into the generations that followed. That is the era in miniature: the moment Tamagotchi grew from a companion into a family affair.