History
See also: List of artificial pet gamesThe 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").
Read more about this topic: Digital Pet
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“We have need of history in its entirety, not to fall back into it, but to see if we can escape from it.”
—José Ortega Y Gasset (18831955)
“One classic American landscape haunts all of American literature. It is a picture of Eden, perceived at the instant of history when corruption has just begun to set in. The serpent has shown his scaly head in the undergrowth. The apple gleams on the tree. The old drama of the Fall is ready to start all over again.”
—Jonathan Raban (b. 1942)
“... that there is no other way,
That the history of creation proceeds according to
Stringent laws, and that things
Do get done in this way, but never the things
We set out to accomplish and wanted so desperately
To see come into being.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)