The is a handheld digital pet that was created in Japan by Akihiro Yokoi of WiZ and Aki Maita of Bandai. It was released by Bandai on November 23, 1996 in Japan and in the USA on May 1, 1997, quickly becoming one of the biggest toy fads of the late 1990s and the early 2000s. , over units have been sold worldwide. Most Tamagotchi are housed in a small egg-shaped handheld video game with an interface consisting of three buttons, with the Tamagotchi Pix adding a shutter on the top to activate the camera. According to Bandai, the name is a portmanteau combining the two Japanese words , which means "egg", and "watch". After the original English spelling of watch, the name is sometimes romanized as Tamagotch without the "i" in Japan. Most Tamagotchi characters' names end in in Japanese, with few exceptions. History Tamagotchi was invented by Aki Maita and Akihiro Yokoi in 1996. They both won the 1997 Ig Nobel Prize for economics, dubbing them the father and mother of tamagotchi. Tamagotchi is a keychain-sized virtual pet simulation game. The characters are colorful creatures with simple designs based on animals, objects, or people. In 2004, beginning with the Tamagotchi Plus/Connection, a second wave of Tamagotchi toys emerged, featuring a different graphic design by artist JINCO and gameplay which elaborated upon the first generations. However, the story behind the games remained the same: Tamagotchis are a small alien species that deposited an egg on Earth to see what life was like, and it is up to the player to raise the egg into an adult creature. The creature goes through several stages of growth, and will develop differently depending on the care the player provides, with better care resulting in an adult creature that is smarter, happier, and requires less attention. Gameplay can vary widely between models, and some models, such as TamagoChu, require little to no care from the player. When releasing the Tamagotchi in Japan, Bandai initially marketed them exclusively to teenage girls. Bandai and WiZ would later create a masculine counterpart to the Tamagotchi, the Digital Monster, which would spawn the Digimon franchise. Gameplay Upon activating the pet, an egg appears on the screen. After setting the clock on the device, the egg will wiggle for several minutes, and then hatch into a small pet. In later versions, inputting the player's name and birthday is