TamaTown

» see tamatown.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

TamaTown was for children who owned a Tamagotchi in 2006, and I was twenty-two that year. The egg itself had been a 1997 phenomenon and I was thirteen when that happened, which is already the wrong side of the line, and by the time the toy grew a website I was at university and firmly outside the audience.

What it was: a browser world attached to a keychain toy. Bandai launched it in 2006 for the Tamagotchi Connection Version 3 and kept extending it, eventually covering versions 4 and 4.5, then Familitchi and Familitchi Celebrity, then Music Star and the Tama-Go. The English sites served North America and Europe. Japan had its own, under different names.

The town had a town hall, a theater, a mall, a school, an arcade and a food court, plus the houses of your Tamagotchi's parents and grandparents and a palace for the King. You went there to earn points and items that the toy could not produce on its own, which is a very neat piece of product design: the website existed to make the plastic thing worth more.

Then it stopped, on 6 February 2013, and the toys did not know. That is the part that makes this a grave rather than a footnote. The hardware kept generating codes for a destination that had been switched off.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the code you typed ~

There was no account and no network connection in the toy. Data moved between the device and the website as a hexadecimal string of ten to fourteen digits, which you read off a screen the size of a stamp and typed into a login box. When you left the town, the site gave you another code and you typed it back into the toy.

Version 3 worked slightly differently: receive an item and a ten-digit password appeared, which you entered on the device. Either way a child was manually carrying a payload across an air gap, one character at a time, and the whole design sat on the assumption that they would happily do it. They did.

~ why bandai stopped ~

The reason given by everyone who followed it is that TamaTown had stopped making money. There was no scandal and no legal problem, just a Flash property attached to a toy line that had moved on, still costing something to host.

The shutdown came in two pieces. On 6 February 2013 the US servers went, taking the American Version 3 and Version 4 sites and the international Version 6 and 7 town with them. The European Version 3 and Version 4 sites survived a few more months and closed for good that July. Nobody archived them in between, which is why the second half of that sentence still annoys people.

~ what survived the flash ~

Not much, and not officially. TamaTown is on the Lost Media Wiki as partially found, which means fragments of the Flash exist while whole sections do not. A developer later put a project on GitHub trying to wake the town back up from what survived.

Flash sites die worse than other websites. A forum leaves text behind and a photo host leaves photos, but an interactive world compiled into a plugin binary that no browser will run anymore leaves a file nobody can open. The town is not deleted so much as sealed.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »