In the 1990s, portable console games emerged. Some may remember the 'Brick Game' which was really a console dedicated to the Tetris game. Tetris, incidentally, was programmed by a bored Russian computer scientist, Alexei Pajitnov.
Game programming, which come up as a field as early as people realised computers could be used for entertainment too, would extend its application out of computers and into handheld game consoles in the 1990s. Famous companies include Japanese brands Nintendo and SEGA. However, what really spurred game programming in toys was really the availability of smaller, cheaper circuit-boards and microprocessors which could be mass-produced.
In 1996/1997, (again) Japanese toy producer Ban Dai released the Tamagotchi and the Digimon devices, both very similar to each other. Basically, these were electronic pets that were kept on a device that was small enough to be a keychain, and these pets needed looking after eg, fed, cleaned and could evolve, or 'grow'.
Tamago Circuit Board
Digimons could fight each other via 'connecting' the devices through sending electronic data codes to each other which would sort of 'trade' data between devices, and the outcome would be based on a pre-programmed algorithm. (This though is only a hypothesis, through discussion with peers who remember playing with Digimon as kids). So far we have not managed to find any sources on reverse-engineering a Digimon. Digimons were said to have been easily 'hacked' by children, though, by inserting various 'chip' cards in a certain way to 'confuse' the device, leading it to 'level up' their Digimon faster. (Again, this information was gotten through asking people what they remember of the Digimon) This perhaps shows that perhaps during the 90s, the codes written for Digimon, at least were probably not very complicated.
Ban Dai has recently stepped up their game, though. Later versions of the Tamagotchi could connect with each other through Infra-red, and , since there seems to be more interest in hacking a Tamagotchi, while most people agree that Tamagotchi uses a ROM code, no one has yet been able to 'dump' the ROM, though they have been able to modify the Tamagotchi in various other ways. Natalie Silvanovich, who presented her project on reverse engineering a Tamagotchi in Germany has by far the most comprehensive set of information regarding the make up of a Tamagotchi. Silvanovich's research has led her to find out that the Tamagotchi used an 8bit, 6502 microprocessor. This was first made by MOS Technology in 1975, and was used in computers like the apple IIe and the Nintendo Family computer!
The significance behind these small, keychain toys is to show how tiny and advanced circuit-boards and microprocessors can really get. 1996 was before the time of smart phones being affordable and commercially available so compared to that, the Tamagotchi and Digimon are really quite novel devices, if one considers that these stemmed from pre- World War II technologies which used to occupy rooms of space which could do less than what these 'toys' (I guess one could now argue they were mini-computers) could.
Furthermore, almost every 'smart toy' today (including Furby, no doubt!) would probably have a microprocessor in it, the Tamagotchi's were certainly not the first toys to use microprocessors in them, as we will see from the next section , It's Alive!
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