Virtual Pets You May Not Have Seen

Virtual pets were all the rage in the late 1990 and have kept a small presence in the toy market since.  To most people it would seem that all of these “product of the year” fads always suffer the one-hit-wonder phenomenon: they pop up out of nowhere, sell a gazillion units, then apparently disappear into obscurity.  Most of these products fit this description.  The Furby later spawned the Shell, which as far as I can remember, was a commercial flop.  I don’t even remember seeing commercials for these let alone seeing them in the stores yet somehow my mom was able to find one on clearance at Target for $2.50.

I remember these things as being mostly a “girls toy” and that I’d never be caught dead with one of them.  Toy manufacturers must have have realized this and came out with a series of “boy virtual pets” as shown above.

The Tamagotchi pets were by far the most popular of this genre, but they seemed… kind of pointless, really.  Why just raise a virtual pet when you could enhance a video game?  Thus Nintendo released “Pokemon Pikachu,” the first add-on peripheral for the Pokemon series of Game Boy video games.  Pokemon Pikachu was essentially a pedometer combined with a virtual pet.  By eliminating the need for monotinous caretaking, Pokemon Pikachu focused more on fitness by tracking steps taken and converting them into a form of virtual currency called “watts.”  These watts could be transferred over to the Pokemon video games and turned into items.

Back in eigth grade there was a guy in my class that was sort of an annoying rival.  He would always come up to me and brag about all of his recent video game achievements in that kind of condescending way that makes you feel like he just looked stuff up on the internet and is claiming to have accomplished something.  I remember seeing him with it one day and thinking “what a loser, walking around with a girly toy.”  He might as well have had a doll, for all I cared.  Then I read about them in Nintendo Power Magazine and realized that I was missing out on valuable items!  (Of course, I later found out how to hack the crap out of the game with a Game Shark and get all of the items without working whatsoever)

So, I went to the store and picked up Pokemon Pikachu.  I took it to school for 2 days before realizing how I probably shouldn’t have bought it.

When Pokemon Gold and Silver came out in 2000, Nintendo again released the Pokemon Pikachu, this time rebranded into the Pokemon Pikachu 2 with a color screen and compatability with the new games.  This time around I was in high school and while I did play the crap out of Gold and Silver I never bothered with the Pokemon Pikachu 2 (which I got here on clearance for less than $5).

Nintendo brought the concept back AGAIN in 2009 with the re-release of the Gold and Silver games on the Nintendo DS, again rebranded as the “Pokewalker.”  It made sense back in the 90s to make Pikachu the exclusive character to the portable unit since he was by far one of the most popular characters, but now that there are nearly 500 species of Pokemon characters in the games it makes sense to allow any character to be played as a virtual pet–and that’s exactly what Nintendo did.

Before Nintendo released the Pokemon Pikachu, Tiger Electronics came out with Star Wars virual pets.  As far as I’m aware, the R2-D2 and Yoda were the only made in this like.  Abandoning the “take care of this thing or it will die” model of Tamagotchi, these pets offered up something different.  R2-D2 acted like a virtually-useless sidekick robot and Yoda trained your Jedi skills.  I can’t remember ever using these for more than a week and, admittedly, were only purchased back then out of Star Wars completionism.

There we have it: a look back at a few of the more boy-oriented virual pets of the late 1990s.  In retrospect, they were somewhat innovative but leave the bad taste of shame in your mouth for having spent money on them.