The Pocket-Sized Pet That Was Never Meant to Die

The Pocket-Sized Pet That Was Never Meant to Die

Everything on a PocketStation is small. The buttons, the screws, the lid, the parts inside. When one comes to my bench, I open it slowly, a little nervous that a piece will go missing before I close it again.

The part I find broken most often is the lid on the front. The screen, on the units I work on, has usually held up better than I expected. I should say that I do not take them apart that deep.

Look at it closed and you can see what it was aiming for. It is cute. It is the kind of thing you carry around and look after, like a pet. To my eye, the Tamagotchi is all over its shape.

The people who made its best-known game felt the same pull. Hiromichi Takahashi, who directed Doko Demo Issyo, has said his team was working under the Tamagotchi's influence. A Tamagotchi dies when its time is up, so they had to ask the same question about their own character. They pictured a creature that had learned to talk, and a player waking up to find it dead on the screen. They decided that was too much. Their characters leave instead, each one to follow its own purpose.

More than twenty-five years later, the PocketStation still sells well in my shop, and neither colour waits longer than the other: the white goes, and so does the clear. In 2026 Bandai, the company behind the Tamagotchi, turned it into a tiny capsule-toy charm and brought it back again that summer.

On the real ones, the lid is the part I find broken. On the miniature, it is the part they made sure would open.