30 years later and I still have no idea how to keep a Tamagotchi alive

As part of the selection of gifts that I purchased for my fiancé to open on Christmas morning 2024, I chose a special Tamagotchi-style Kingdom Hearts virtual pet. It’s one of his favorite games, and it was something cute to stuff into his stocking, but it got me feeling nostalgic about my own experience with Tamagotchis. 

Like an idiot, I voiced this nostalgic longing and my fiancé, being as wonderful as he is, immediately ordered me a new one and I actually, for a brief time, felt excited at the prospect of raising this pixel pet. Then it arrived, I named it “Pixy” as it started beeping, and it only managed to reach the ripe old age of two before it inexplicably died after being fed nothing but cake because I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. 

I think I was around six when I first held a Tamagotchi in my hand, and at that age they feel huge. A childs fingers are the perfect size to fiddle around with the tiny buttons on the front of a Tamagotchi, and I spent hours desperately trying to figure out how to keep it alive. It never worked, and I shed many tears over my failed attempts at pixel parenthood, but at leas𝕴t I could always get another fresh egg to try over again. 

In the time since, I’ve grown up. I’m what most people would describe as a functioning adult. I have a house, a job, a family. I’ve managed to keep my own daughter alive for four years and she’s positively thriving, and I have a cat who is as happy as can be. My renewed experience as a Tamagotchi owner has convinced me of one thing — keeping a human child or an actu🐠al pet alive and well is easy, but keeping this pixel pocket pet alive and without complaint is next to impossible. 

For starters, I need to squint in order to even see what the icons around the screen mean. Rather inexplicably, my Tamagotchi expels a disproportionate amount of poop, and I just had to leave my fledgling virtual pet with poop next to him while I figured out that the vaguely duck-esque icon in the bottom left corner would, for some reason that I cannot explain, blow wind across the screen and remove the pile of excrement. Okay, I’d dealt with the potty training, so now we can move on to feeding the thing.&nbꦿsp;

That’s a knife and fork icon. I can understand that, it’s relatively straightforward, and I have the option to give him (yes, it’s a him, I don’t know why) either a burger or cake. Neither of these seem like a particularly healthy option for what amounts to a newborn, but those are my options. My first failed virtual child lived his short life sustained by a diet exclusively consisting of cake, which I thought was okay, until it died. Apparently that was the wrong choice. Cake is a snack, while the burger is a meal. Noted, onto attempt two.

After my second e💞gg hatched, I immediately started shoveling burgers down its newborn gullet and moved on to the next task. Making it happy.&👍nbsp;

I should say that Tamagotchis don’t exactly come with detailed instructions. Short of telling you how to hatch a new egg (useful, considering how often they die on you), they basically leave you to figure things out on your own. For my gen 2 Tamagotchi, playing consists of a higher or lower style game, except I couldn’t figure out why my little blob was unhappy with me, and it took me longer than I care to admit 🦩before I realized that I needed to use two bu𓆏ttons to guess which number would be higher. 

Up until this point, I’d been enjoying single button gameplay. Adding in a second button with zero explanation threw me off. I’m an old dog, you can’t teach me new tricks, at least not easily. However, a couple days later I had a four year old Tamagotchi that had somehow evolved to the “teen” stage. He 🍨was happy. He was well fed. And then he die🌳d. 

By now, I’d figured out some of the more useful details about life as a Tamagotchi parent. I knew that he would go to sleep at 8 p.m. and I needed to turn the light off within 10 minutes or he would become restless and wake up again. That’s considered “good care” in the Tamagotchi world, and I was proud of myself for learning something. I found myself looking forward to 8 p.m., excited to finally stop the incessant beeping that now apparently fills mꦍy days. 

The Tamagotchi wakes up and starts beeping at me again at 9 a.m. the next day and it starts all over again. Feed, play, wait. That’s the entire process of owning a Tamagotchi, and it’s been the🔴 most oddly addictive experience of my life. I can’t tell whether I love this 🐎thing or hate it, and every beep causes me to enter a panic filled state just in case I pick it up and my pixel child is somehow dead despite being well cared for. 

To make my own life worse, I decided to buy a second Tamagotchi for my daughter in an attempt to stop her from trying to play with mine. This was, in hindsight, something of a mistake. She’s obsessed with it and carries it everywhere, but she can’t take it to bed or school with her. So now I have two Tamagotchis to look after, and the added weight of responsibility that the second is beloved by a four-year-old and if👍 it di💝es, I have to explain why Mommy dropped the ball and let it perish. 

So here I am, on the third reincarnation of my own virtual pet and the second of my daughters, although she doesn’t know that the first one died and I don’t plan on telling her. I’m a parent, cat owner, and virtual guardian of these little pixel creatures. That’s a lot of responsibility. I still have hardly any idea what I’m doing, but I’m determined to beat my four year record. I have a newfound respect for those who seem to find this so easy, and my search history is filled with “what does it mean if your Tamagotchi…” queries.