A long, long time ago… When all this was field and the guide to make a web page as spectacular as possible, that insanity of Space Jam, the personalization of your PC It did not include LED lights, graphics larger than the box or liquids at 350 dollars per carafe.
At that time, everything was limited to modifying your cursors, changing the color of the windows and, if you were lucky and someone with the Internet made your afternoon happy with a floppy disk, you could even add some additional fantasy, such as the origin of the Tamagotchi. , Digimon and Pokémon: the virtual pets desktop.
The precursors of the Tamagotchi
Although we normally cling to 1996 to talk about the birth of virtual pets at the hands of the TamagotchisIn fact, we would have to go even further back to track this trend. Specifically until 1988 with the launch of the Japanese PC-9800 NEC.
There, a year before the phenomenon jumped to Mac creating a trend beyond Japan, the cat was born Nekoa program that painted a sprite of a cat on the screen that, under certain conditions and rules, would chase the mouse cursor as you moved it from side to side.
A Neko It was followed by a good handful of versions and modifications that changed the color of the cat and certain animations such as going to sleep, but in reality it was another animal that finished exploiting the concept and, with it, the fever kicked off. of the screenmates.
maybe because Screen Mate Poo Nothing comes to mind right now if you lived through that time, but if I talk to you about the DeskSheep
A UFO just abducted my goat.
That cute billy goat walked across the screen, jumped, stopped to eat flowers, made croquettes, took a bath and, to the surprise of all of us who lived through that moment, magically climbed to the edges of other windows. to then look directly into our eyes and fall asleep. Crazy when a UFO came and abducted him.
Desktop virtual pet fever has finally exploded in 1996 Hand in hand with a tidal wave of bugs that ranged from frogs to cockroaches or even ants that little by little began to destroy your wallpaper to shape their own anthill.
By the end of that same year, also from Japan, virtual pets took an additional leap with the arrival of the Tamagotchis and, following that same fever but taking the care of pixelated bugs one step further, including combat with other devices, the mythical Digimon.
You already know the rest of the story, but if you want to relive that mythical past, or experience it for the first time to see firsthand that we got excited about anything, there are plenty of fans out there. virtual pets as Neko o Poo who intend to give them a second life.
In ExtraLife | How a Game You’ve Enjoyed Tons of Times Saved Hundreds of Lives in WWII: The Monopoly Revolution
