Description

Tamagotchi (“Egg Watch”) is a brand of handheld digital pets that was created in Japan by Akihiro Yokoi of WiZ and Aki Maita of Bandai. It was released by Bandai on November 23, 1996 in Japan and in the United States on May 1, 1997, quickly becoming one of the biggest toy fads of the late 1990s and the early 2000s. As of June 2023, over 91 million units have been sold worldwide. Most Tamagotchi are housed in a small egg-shaped handheld video game with an interface consisting of three buttons, with the Tamagotchi Pix adding a shutter on the top to activate the camera.

According to Bandai, the name is a portmanteau combining the two Japanese words tamago, which means “egg”, and uotchi “watch”. After the original English spelling of watch, the name is sometimes Romanised as Tamagotch without the “i” in Japan. Most Tamagotchi characters’ names end in tchi or chi in Japanese, with few exceptions.