Tamagotchi Turns Thirty and Shrinks to a Ring. 116 Parts Became 64.
Bandai's anniversary move was to take parts away: 116 down to 64, and the whole thing onto a finger. Three decades in, the appeal is still that it needs you.
Bandai has marked Tamagotchi's 30th anniversary by turning it into a ring. Dezeen covered it today: a 28-millimetre egg on a clear adjustable band, with a 0.56-inch full-colour screen, finished in gold, silver or pearl pink. Pre-orders are open in Japan only at 7,700 yen, about $48, with shipping in early 2027.
The engineering story is subtraction. Two years of development brought the part count down to 64, against 116 in last year's Tamagotchi Paradise, and the unit is 56 percent the size of the 1996 original. The USB port is gone; the ring charges in its own case, the first time a Tamagotchi has shipped with a dedicated charging base. The front buttons, too small to press at this scale, move to the side of the egg. What survives intact is the game itself: hatch, feed, clean, and raise your pet into one of 30 characters drawn from three decades of the series, plus a hidden egg. Bandai's smallest device is, on the inside, the same creature.
Gentle Future covers the shift from maximum functionality to maximum well-being, and Tamagotchi is a useful case because it has never tracked a single thing about its owner. It asks. The most durable pocket device of the last thirty years wants something from you, on a schedule, and people keep it alive because it needs them. Maybe this is what happens when a company celebrates an anniversary by removing parts rather than adding features. The real question: how many of the devices on a wrist or a finger right now would survive being made smaller, simpler, and needier?