A Look t Some of the Virtual Friends We’ve Made Over the Years (2 of 5)

SmarterChild

A lot of teenagers loved to have fun with SmarterChild. Compatible with messenger platforms AOL, Yahoo! And MSN, this predecessor to chat clients like Slack and Discord was intended to be a way for folks to look up information — for instance, about what movies are currently playing at the cinema — or even to play text-based games, but of course it became a virtual punching bag where you could type vulgar insults and enjoy the bot’s pithy responses.

Tamagotchi Digital Pets

If you were growing up in the mid-1990s, it is impossible to forget Bandai’s Tamagotchi digital pets! These keychain thingies with a small black and white screen and a few buttons were first sold in Japan in 1996 and brought over to the U.S. the following year, it was a huge fad for quite some time. The objective was simple: take care of your virtual pet as it goes through all the lifecycles and keep it happy until it dies. Some caretakers were known to literally have funerals and bury their virtual pets after death!