Giga Pets
The keychain virtual pet you fed, cleaned, and played with between classes — America's answer to the Tamagotchi craze. Neglect it and it got sick; ignore it too long and it died right there in your backpack.
Giga Pets were launched by Tiger Electronics in May 1997, riding the virtual-pet wave that Japan's Tamagotchi had kicked off the year before. The concept had actually been invented separately as 'V-Pets' by the firm REHCO in 1995, then licensed to Tiger, which turned it into a phenomenon: a keychain-sized LCD creature you kept alive by pressing buttons to feed it, clean up after it, and play with it. Cheaper and more widely available in the US than the Tamagotchi, Giga Pets were often the version American kids actually got their hands on.
The launch lineup — Digital Doggie, Compu Kitty, and Micro Chimp — soon grew to include a Baby T-Rex, a Virtual Alien, and more. The stakes were the same as their rival's: a running well-being score meant a neglected pet would sicken and die — the average Giga Pet lasted only about two weeks. Kids smuggled them into class, teachers confiscated them, and the beeping demands for attention became the soundtrack of 1997.
The craze burned bright and fast. By the end of 1998, US virtual-pet sales had collapsed by nearly 80 percent, and the fad moved on. Tiger Electronics was acquired by Hasbro in 1998, and while Giga Pets have been revived here and there since, they belong firmly to that brief, frantic window when a plastic keychain could genuinely break your heart.
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