scary crayons
I actually had an original Tamagotchi, and I loved it!
I remember some very notable things about it though that makes the Tamagotchi in the first post sound like it was either broken, or a bootleg D:
- Tamagotchis went to bed at 8pm every night, and woke up at 8am. Between those times, you couldn't even interact with them, because they were sleeping. I mainly remember this because I used to watch a cartoon channel that went off-air at 8pm, and the channel played an animation of the lights turning off on the channel logo... and when the lights went off on the TV, my Tamagotchi went to bed too. : D
- Tamagotchis had a mute button, which was important for school stuff! You didnt give to take super-constant-attention to them, they just 'evolved' into different forms as they grew up if you took better or worse care of them. They didn't die unless you didn't feed or clean them for three days straight.
- Tamagotchis used a 'plastic tag' thing to turn them off. You'd put the plastic insert into the side, and they would switch off.
- When Tamagotchis died, either from not giving them any attention, or them living out their whole life (30 days), you could just get a new one by resetting the Tamagotchi (putting the plastic tag in the side, then removing it, and starting anew)
Soooo~ Tamagotchis weren't really as bad as that first post made them sound. x3 It does seem like yours was either a bootleg thing, or had its clock set incorrectly, and no instructions to tell you how to mute or reset it. D:
(Though, I do remember someone 'permanently killing' their Tamagotchi by giving it a bath... by putting the electronic thing in soapy water x.x)
Sorry for the late quote, but I had to take a bit of time to think about it and do some Google research.
As I remember, the very first ones may not have had those features. However, it's been ages, and I don't always remember stuff from 13 odd years ago. And come to think of it, mine probably was just some knock-off product manufactured in China or something. I remembered it being explicitly labeled on the packaging as a Tamagotchi, but it doesn't really seem all that weird in retrospect that some enterprising bootleggers would be ballsy enough to actually claim their junk is the real thing.
If it wasn't a knock-off, though, I'd be pissed at Bandai for stuffing an incomplete game into the box and passing it off as the whole package.
Edit: I feel dumb now. I ran a Google search for Tamagotchi knock offs and, after using a *slightly* different search term, I ended up realizing that what my parents had bought me was not an actual Tamagotchi, but a Giga Pet, a legitimate and fairly similar product released by some company named Tiger Electronics or something like that, which appears to have been bought by Hasbro. All references to Tamagotchi in the original post will be changed accordingly shortly.