The Hardware

The hardware parts inside of the Tamagotchi shell are not exactly something that one would consider a source of nostalgia amongst the average Tamagotchi user. With that being said, during our team's research we were surprised to discover not one, but MANY sites dedicated to uncovering what exactly makes a Tamagtochi tick; including but not limited to: tama.loociano, unmakr via art plus marketing, tamatalk, and necrobones.

These sites sprang up for a number of reasons. Some were created to help users “debug” or “hack” their devices so that they could do things like select their Tama pet in lieu of having one randomly generate (see tamatalk). Unmakr dissected not just the physical Tamagotchi device, but the circumstances that led to the original device’s mass-popularity. Yoann Lopez and Christophe Werbrouck of Unmakr included a screenshots of a teardown:

Figure 1. a breakdown of the outer and inner hardware of a Tamagotchi device Lopez and Werbrouck.

The prevalence of these sites shows that there is something about the inner-workings of the Tamagotchi device that attracts certain kinds of fans—tinkerers, engineers, programmers, professional and laymen. One can intuit that the Tamagotchi device was a gateway into computers for many of these young professionals and curious nerds. The devices are simple and relatively cheap, lending themselves to easy and low-risk exploration. When talking Tamagotchi, all elements, including typically unseen hardware, appear to matter to fans.

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