On November 23, the Tamagotchi turns 30. Thirty years of beeps, poop-scooping, and guilt-tripping pocket pets, with more than 82 million units sold along the way. Before the color screens, the Wi-Fi, and the designer collabs, though, there is a quieter story worth retelling: the toy nearly never happened, and its creators once won an Ig Nobel Prize for it.
A boy, a turtle, and a TV ad
The spark hit Akihiro Yokoi, then president of WiZ, a small Tokyo firm that designed toy concepts for bigger companies, somewhere in the 1990s. As he told the New York Times, he was watching a commercial in which a boy wanted to take his pet turtle on a family trip and was told to leave it at home.
Yokoi was, by all accounts, an animal person: dogs, cats, parrots, and beetles shared his home at various points. He knew pets are wonderful maybe 20 to 30 percent of the time, and a fair amount of work the rest. But he also knew the longing in that ad. If you could not always pack a real pet, why not a portable one?
So in 1995 he pitched Bandai on a mobile pet. His first concept wrapped the device around the wrist like a watch, and that is where the name comes from: tamago (egg) plus uotchi (watch). Bandai's Aki Maita, who worked in marketing, took the idea and shaped it into something new: a raising simulator, a creature that grew, or failed to, based on real care given in real time. The wristwatch idea gave way to an egg-shaped keychain, which was cheaper and far easier to carry. The egg shape stayed, and so did a blobby character a designer doodled in one meeting.
The pet that demanded everything
The original device was brutally simple: three buttons, a black-and-white LCD, and a creature that beeped until you fed it, cleaned up after it, or disciplined it. Neglect it long enough and it died, a tombstone blinking on the screen in Japan, while American owners were told their pet had returned to its home planet. Yokoi considered the cruelty essential. Effort, he reasoned, is what turns a toy into a pet.
The craze, and the prize
Tamagotchi launched in Japan on November 23, 1996, for about $15 to $17, and reached the United States on May 1, 1997. Within months it was a global phenomenon: the New York Times reported 70 million units ordered in 1997 alone, and Sweden's retail institute named it that year's Christmas gift. Bandai America said more than 82 million Tamagotchis had been sold by 2020.
And the Ig Nobel? In 1997 the satirical prize's economics award went to Yokoi and Maita, hailed as the father and mother of Tamagotchi, for diverting millions of person-hours of work into the husbandry of virtual pets. Bandai had initially promoted Maita as the toy's creator; Yokoi's part became public later that year. The joke prize was not far off, really. Millions of people did spend millions of hours raising a creature that existed only in pixels.
Where the story went
WiZ would follow up with Digimon, pitched as a masculine counterpart to the Tamagotchi, which grew into a franchise of its own. In 2025 the Tamagotchi was inducted into the Strong's World Video Game Hall of Fame. Thirty years on, as the brand celebrates with rings, festivals, and planet-raising devices, the origin story still fits on a keychain: a boy, a turtle, an egg, a watch, and a very strange Nobel Prize.