For those who are too young to know what a Tamagotchi is, it's an egg-Shaped plastic device with a black-and-white screen on which appears a little pixelated (像素化的) pet. With the three buttons below the screen, you can feed the pet, care for it and clean up its mess. And just like a real pet, it gets sick and dies if neglected.
When it was first released by Japanese company Bandai in 1997, this virtual (虚拟的) "pocket pet" was so popular with school children that it was frequently sold out at stores all over the world. For many people, the Tamagotchi was their first ever experience of raising and caring for a "pet".
A lot has certainly changed in the last 20 years — especially when it comes to technology — so would it be a good idea to reintroduce the Tamagotchi to today's world?
Bandai obviously thinks so since it's going to re-release it next month, marking the device's 20th anniversary. "We are going after that nostalgia," said TaraBadie, director of Tamagotchi's brand management, according to The Verge.
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Nostalgia is all the rage these days. Just look at Nintendo's Pokemon Go — the 2016 smartphone game originated from its 1996 version — and Nokia's 2017 version of the 3310 — the mobile phone released in 2000 that it seems nearly everyone in the world owned. But these companies didn't just simply copy from the past — they managed to update the old version and adapt it for the modern world.
With Pokemon Go, Nintendo successfully combined cutting-edge (前沿的) argumented reality (增强现实) technology with the game's original storyline.
"Pokemon Go tells us about the future of software and the nature of reality-and how they integrate (整合) into what we think of as entertainment," technology writer Om Malik wrote on The New Yorker.
And although Nokia's new 3310 stayed faithful to the original phone's design, it added a few modern features like a color screen, camera and internet access. It even kept the symbolic game Snake, which many of today's adults would have spent hours playing as teenagers.
But while nostalgia is certainly a selling point to many people, not everyone is a fan.
"I'm so sick of nostalgia as a ploy (噱头) for profit. From the ‘Make America Great Again' slogan, to the endless Star Wars and X-Men movies, we've become a world obsessed with looking backward for lazy sources of joy", wrote tech reporter Thomas Ricker on The Verge.
But will the magic of nostalgia work with the Tamagotchi? According to Julia Alexander, editor for video website Polygon, it seems pretty unlikely.
After trying the new product, Alexander soon found out that little has been changed since the original.
"I grew up and, unfortunately, the Tamagotchi didn't," she wrote.
So when it comes to nostalgia, maybe the fond memories of our favourite childhood products are best left as that-fond memories.
