Digital Pet - History

History

The concept of raising artificial creatures in a video game originated in the late 1980s. The Megami Tensei series of role-playing video games, first released by Atlus for the Nintendo Famicom console in 1987, allowed players to capture demons as pets and use them in battle. In 1992, Chunsoft's role-playing game Dragon Quest V: Hand of the Heavenly Bride featured an influential monster-collecting mechanic, where monsters can be defeated, captured, added to the party, follow the player character around as a pet, and gain their own experience levels. The game influenced later franchises such as Pokémon, Monster Rancher and Dokapon.

PF Magic released the first widely popular virtual pets in 1995 with Dogz, followed by Catz in the spring of 1996, eventually becoming a franchise known as Petz. Digital pets were further popularized by Nintendo's Pokémon series, debuting in 1996.

Digital pets were a massive fad in Japan, and to a lesser extent in the United States and United Kingdom during the late 1990s. There have been significant improvements of digital pets since Tamagotchi's success when it was released in 1996, from dot-images (such as Tamagotchi) to rendered and animated 3D games (such as Nintendogs). Today, there are also "Digital Pets" which have physical robotic bodies, known as Ludobots or Entertainment robots.

The idea of an animal companion composed of technology rather than flesh has also inspired several works of fiction, such as the anime based loosely on the "Digimon" virtual pets (itself a contraction of "Digital Monster").