Twenty years on, do you still remember the electronic pet that once soothed your loneliness?

Its proper name is Tamagotchi. Its brief moment of glory saved the company that invented it — and then other toys took its place.

Mao Nini, a 19-year-old in Beijing, has owned almost 40 Tamagotchis in ten years. All told, she has spent more than 10,000 yuan on the tiny game device.

Her Instagram holds more than 400 photos of her Tamagotchi-raising: cute new characters she has hatched, hidden scenes she has unlocked, family portraits of pets getting married and having children. She tags every photo #tamagotchi, which has introduced her to quite a few Tamagotchi players abroad.

You may not know the name Tamagotchi, but you probably remember a thing called an "electronic pet."

Tamagotchi was an electronic-pet toy that Japan's Bandai launched in November 1996. On an egg-shaped handheld, three buttons were all you needed to feed and raise the little creature on the screen.

In Tamagotchi's two peak years it sold more than 40 million units worldwide. That number pulled Bandai out of a financial crisis that had pushed the company to the edge of a merger, and its stock rose with it — not unlike what Pokémon Go has done for Nintendo's share price today. A May 1997 report in The New York Times used the word "invasion" to describe the craze: the toy was nearly everywhere, and it sold out as fast as it reached the shelves.

But this object, which sits in most people's childhood memories, dropped out of sight long ago.

Mao Nini met her first electronic pet at the age of three — a knockoff from a street stall. Years later she still complained about that dinosaur-egg-shaped device: "It really wasn't fun to play with, and it kept dying."

Not until she was eight did she understand. A younger girl at school told her the real pet egg was called Tamagotchi. At 138 yuan it felt out of reach, but she wore her parents down and finally bought her first one at Walmart, and after that there was no stopping her. Back when Tamagotchi was still popular, schools banned electronic pets, so Mao Nini and her classmates would slip into the bathroom between classes to link their devices.

Just last month she received the Tamagotchi m!x, the newest model Bandai released for the toy's twentieth anniversary. On Weibo she wrote that playing with it had "moved her to tears."

Diehards like Mao Nini are rare now. To see how wild people once were about this miniature pet machine, you have to go back nearly twenty years.

In May 1997, Tamagotchi had been out for barely six months, and it had caught far more than children and students. Plenty of adults were hooked too. In one report, Mayumi Nishiguchi treated her Tamagotchi chick, "Hanako," as her own child and took it everywhere. After "Hanako" died, the 35-year-old shop owner held a funeral for her electronic pet: she lit a cigarette in place of traditional Japanese incense and prayed for it.

One male office worker complained about his besotted wife: "My wife said good morning to her Tamagotchi, but she didn't say it to me." At the peak of this little device's popularity, there was no ignoring it.

Tamagotchi is a compound word. "Tamago" is Japanese for "egg," and the second half comes from the last syllable of the English word "watch" — so Tamagotchi can be read as "an egg-shaped toy as portable as a watch." Because "Tamagotchi" is hard to remember, players in China more often use the plainer names "electronic chicken" or "pet egg."

The 1996 original was far cruder than today's models: a rough plastic shell, a black-and-white screen, a little animal made of pixel blocks. But the idea was fresh and the controls were dead simple — three buttons were enough to interact with your pet. You could feed it, bathe it, take it to the doctor, check its mood and play with it. Best of all, it stood only 53 mm tall, small enough to take anywhere.

Over twenty years Bandai has released more than forty versions of the device, including the first color-screen Tamagotchi in September 2008. Besides new mechanics like marriage, childbirth and inheritance, each pet character has its own personality and passes through infancy, a rebellious stage, adolescence and so on — much like watching a real pet grow up.

What most people today probably don't know is that the original idea for Tamagotchi came from an ordinary woman working at Bandai: Aki Maita.

In 1994, Maita was 27 and in her fourth year at the company. Fine-featured and a little shy, she collected sales figures and did market research on toys. Lost among Bandai's many employees, she seemed unremarkable.

Japan's economy was in bad shape in the 1990s. The bubble had burst, and the country faced a long stretch of stagnation. The economy grew just 0.6% in 1994, and bankruptcies and job losses were dragging down the birth rate as well.

Doing her market research, Maita found that most children wanted a pet of their own. The reality was harder: with the economic crisis, expensive housing, cramped apartments and crowded cities, many families could not afford one. And for many women, a pet's company could stand in for something missing in their lives. Maita, not yet 30, was one of them — married, no children, and very fond of animals.

She had a new idea, and a television commercial sharpened it: a small boy about to leave on vacation insists on bringing his pet turtle, but he can't. So why shouldn't a "pet" be able to stay with you anywhere, anytime?

The concept of the electronic pet had been around since the 1970s, but a portable pet was still fresh and inventive. Maita aimed first at high school girls in their teens — raising things was a genre few young girls could resist. She went out to the streets of Tokyo again and again with questionnaires, dug for ideas in the magazines those girls read, and gradually worked out what they actually wanted: the product had to be portable, something you could pick up and play at any moment; and it had to look cute enough, sweet enough, to stand apart from the bulky, charmless electronics then on sale in Japan.

"It matters that people find joy in taking care of something, in looking after it," Maita said of her original intent. But she only came up with the concept, and later took over the marketing. The man who actually led development was Akihiro Yokoi, president of WiZ, another Japanese toy planning and development company — and his ties to Bandai went back a long way.

Yokoi graduated from the economics department of Chuo University in March 1977 and joined Bandai that April. Ten years later he left to found WiZ, though the two companies kept working together. In 1995 he took charge of Tamagotchi's development and, with a handful of colleagues, began turning Maita's idea into a physical object. Those same colleagues were also the first people on the Digimon virtual-pet project — a device spun off from Tamagotchi and aimed at boys, which would soon become Tamagotchi's rival.

In October 1996, Maita took the finished prototype to the streets of Shibuya and handed it to about 200 high school girls to test. She watched their eyes light up the moment they took one, and that gave her a great deal of confidence. A few weeks later the team settled the final details, and a clean white became Tamagotchi's first color. Even then, all they wanted was a cheap, easy-to-keep "pet." No one saw what was coming a month later.

At the end of November, Tamagotchi went on sale in Japan.

To the astonishment of Maita, Yokoi and the rest of the team, it swept the country at once. The egg-shaped device came out of nowhere almost overnight and quickly took over toy markets abroad. High school girls were only the start: small children and adults fell for it too.

Seven months later it had sold 5 million units in Japan alone, worth US$150 million to Bandai. It went on to reach toy markets in more than 30 countries. Five months after the Japanese launch it arrived in the United States, and at its 1990s peak, 15 Tamagotchis sold every minute in North America. Each one cost less than US$16, but once stores ran out, impatient buyers paid hundreds of dollars for one on the black market.

Of this "invasion," Gregory Smith, a scholar at Dickinson College, told The New York Times in a 1997 interview: "Being depended on is a pleasure in itself. We always complain about people who are too dependent, but the truth is that being needed always feels good."

Machiko Kusahara, a scholar at Japan's Kobe University, argues that Tamagotchi satisfied particular human desires — the wish to raise a pet without spending real resources, for one. "This kind of toy also satisfies the desire for control. Whatever happens to these players in real life, they at least control the fate of their electronic pet, and they take full responsibility for its entire life cycle."

"In a sense they are playing God. And it offers instant gratification: a real pet takes years to grow up, a Tamagotchi only a few days."

Sailor Moon needed three years to break into the American market; Tamagotchi needed a few months. The sudden, enormous success felt unreal to Maita. "I feel like I've created a superstar," she said in an interview at the time. Bandai was caught off guard by the demand too; a spokesman said the company would raise monthly output to 3 million units.

Then the craze passed, and the superstar's fall seemed to take no time at all.

Two years after Tamagotchi entered global markets in force, sales began to slide fast. In mid-1997 Bandai was still selling 3 million a month; by the spring of 1998 it was selling 1 million. Schools started barring students from bringing Tamagotchis into class and discouraged parents from buying them, because so many students carried one that the devices' "calls" kept chirping through lessons. Players had little choice: they had to watch and tend their Tamagotchi constantly, or the pet would "die." A pet that died from neglect left these children, who had poured themselves into it, miserable, and the "funeral" scene at the end scarred some of them.

At the same time its direct rivals, Pokémon and Digimon, began taking the market. Spin-off animated series helped them eclipse Tamagotchi and build legends of their own. That is no surprise: players lose their appetite for a game quickly, and next to Tamagotchi's simple feed-and-care loop, Pokémon had far more to do.

By 1999 real demand for Tamagotchi had dropped sharply, and the knockoffs everywhere on the market made Bandai's position harder still. Because departments inside the company weren't sharing what they knew, things had already spun out of control, and a genuine crisis followed. Piled-up inventory cost Bandai 6 billion yen, and the company's deficit reached 4.5 billion yen.

The blow was heavy enough that Bandai released no new Tamagotchi model for four years, from 1999 to 2003.

Through that blank stretch, Nintendo and Sony went on fighting their console war in Japan, more and more popular games appeared, and Super Mario Bros., Pokémon and Sonic the Hedgehog kept getting bigger. When people mentioned Tamagotchi, it was usually in passing: "Oh, I used to play that."

So Tamagotchi was beaten and slowly forgotten, in a way no one could resist — people had found more alternatives, and more interesting ones.

But Bandai wasn't ready to give up. In 2001, Yokoi and Yukimasa Sugiura, then Bandai's president, tried to revive the product. They found a new angle, and eight- and nine-year-old schoolgirls became the target: girls that age badly wanted to use mobile phones, and they liked to talk with friends about their pets.

So the new Tamagotchi released in 2004 added infrared communication. Players could link devices with each other and also swap data by phone, and that sociability enriched what the toy could do. The design grew cuter, and Tamagotchis in dozens of colors became a fashion among girls; some schoolgirls hung two or three around their necks.

Over the next decade or so, Bandai used new models and new mechanics to win a fresh crop of fans and pull some of the old ones back in. Still, in the seven years from 2004 to 2011 Tamagotchi sold only 39 million units — slow going next to the 40 million it sold in the two years from 1996 to 1998. But it met Bandai's goal of putting the toy back on the market. It never recovered its old glory and drew no great heat, but it had found a more durable life.

Lin Yi fell for Tamagotchi all over again in the summer of 2015.

Lin Yi is 16 and keeps a paper planner. She had played with a Tamagotchi in first grade but set it aside after about a month. "I think that's on me. I've liked playing with all sorts of things since I was little, but nothing lasts. I lose interest fast."

Last year she came across a Tamagotchi thread on a planner forum on Baidu Tieba and learned that the toy had "evolved" into a color-screen version. Seeing it there, she fell in love on the spot: "That fluttery feeling, you know?"

On Children's Day she pestered her parents until they agreed to buy her a Tamagotchi P's. She still remembers how excited she was to hold it; she spent half an hour dressing it in a little knitted coat. "I think it just looks too cute. Even if you're not playing with it, it's a pleasure to have sitting there."

Lin Yi says both the planner and the Tamagotchi give her back her girlhood: "For me it's just cute and fun. I want to keep a bit of a child's heart." She calls the pets inside her Tamagotchi her children and nicknamed the first girl she hatched "Little Mushroom." She had no experience, so "Little Mushroom" ended up "eloping" with another character, which upset her at the time. Once she got the hang of it, she raised eight "girls" and six "boys." It takes some skill, because the better you care for them, the cuter the characters turn out — and a new "day care" function means she no longer has to watch the device every minute.

Bandai has released a mobile Tamagotchi game, but Lin Yi thinks that once it is an app it becomes an ordinary game: "It doesn't feel alive. There's no Tamagotchi soul in it." Talking about this, she sounds thrilled, in a mood perhaps no different from the obsessives of twenty years ago — people who treasured their pets and tended them carefully, hoping they would grow up healthy and reach a perfect ending.

Young girls still make up the overwhelming majority of players. Most of the ones Lin Yi has met are between 14 and 18; male players, in her experience, are rare — much as Maita positioned the toy twenty years ago.

But most people don't know Tamagotchi still exists, and its once-celebrated developers were forgotten long ago. Lin Yi thinks too many things compete for young people's attention now: "Electronics are so advanced. Most people are on their phones or iPads. It's not just people my age either — little kids are on iPads all the time now, and they don't notice Tamagotchi."

She once joined two QQ groups for fans, who call themselves mayou, a pun on "Tama friends." "One was started by Tamagotchi players — 15 people, and nobody has said anything for months. The other belonged to a Taobao seller, and I left that one long ago."

These days Lin Yi looks up strategy guides herself, with a quick Baidu search. She says she'll keep buying new models as they come.

Mao Nini puts it more bluntly: "In my last year of high school I wanted to quit too, but I found I couldn't. Maybe I'll think about it again someday, but I really can't climb out of this hole."

Most of the other people interviewed said the toy no longer interests them.

Evian, now 24, was obsessed with Tamagotchi in second and third grade, and she also loves console games. She works at a startup now, under real pressure, and playing games has become a luxury. She was surprised that this retro product had a color-screen version, but she felt no urge to pick it up again.

"You don't like it anymore?"

"Because I grew up," she said.

(Mao Nini and Evian are pseudonyms, at their request.)

Cover image from: huffingtonpost, youtube