Tamagotchi set up shop at NYCC this year, bringing Limited Edition offerings as well as a wide variety of products and accessories. As an elder millennial I remember when Tamagotchi first came to the states. I had my own egg shaped electronic keychain and diligently cared for my little black and white pixelated pet, feeding it, playing with it, and cleaning up its poop. I also eventually neglected it, left it for certain death, and in the end, forgot about it all together. While Americans dismissed Tamagotchi as a 90s fad, Japan whole heartedly embraced the product. Tamagotchi never disappeared overseas, launching a wide variety of products, collectables, and accessories.
Then the COVID-19 hit. In 2020 Tamagotchi began to creep back in popularity here in the states. It makes a certain amount of sense, as the pandemic forced us all to connect and communicate electronically. A couple years later, Tamagotchi would pair with properties like Peanuts, Star Wars, Hello Kitty and Jurassic World, launching licensed characters. Now, with Tamagotchi Nano (an even smaller version of the original Tamagotchi), you can care for a dinosaur, Snoopy, you can even raise young Anakin Skywalker.
The real surprise, however, when I was given a tour of Tamagotchi’s 2025 NYCC booth was the Tamagotchi Paradise. Similar to Pokemon in that it starts with a choice between three iterations – land, water, or air, the Paradise is a huge, incredibly popular step forward for the brand. These Tamagotchi feature full color screens as well as a dial which allows the user to zoom in all the way to the cellular level or all the way out to the universe beyond. Flip the top of your Tamagotchi open and you can physically connect your unit to a friend’s so your characters can hang out and interact. At the NYCC booth, users could connect their Paradise to a special console on-site to receive rare items.
Branding at the booth showed just a small fraction of the thousands of character iterations available on the Tamagotchi Paradise. The choices you make in how you care for your pet influence what character and beyond that what version of each character it grows into. In this way, Tamagotchi is also leaning into the blind box-esque mania that currently has a strangle hold on pop culture as society looks for small doses of serotonin wherever we can get it.
Ultimately Tamagotchi has always been here. It was never a fad. Something proven by its reintroduction to, and success in, the states. It’s a simple concept, executed and repeated in new ways extremely well. As a matter of fact, in addition to the newer, full color, integratable Paradise, Tamagotchi brought a limited edition version of the Original Tamagotchi. Featuring the original programming from the 1990s, this limited edition shell was number one on the sales board. At its core, the original concept not only still functions, it still sells. After visiting at NYCC and getting a crash course in the last 29 years of the brand (2026 is the 30th anniversary)I for one, along with my new digital pet Snoopy, will likely never forget Tamagotchi again.
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