Jenny List
Contributing editor and European correspondent at Hackaday.
“A friend of mine worked for a British catalog shop during that period in the 90s. And they had to put up a notice because people would bring back their Tamagotchis for a refund after they died. They had to put up a notice… pointing out that somewhere in the battery compartment was a reset button.”
Hackaday Podcast · Hands-On Engineering Podcasts · October 2026
Context
The hosts were reminiscing about the history of Tamagotchi hacking, from the original units to the new Tamagotchi Paradise. Jenny adds a story about a shop getting returns of dead virtual pets.
Transcript
Impressive. Wow. Genuinely impressive.
…able to dig up a data sheet that let her figure out how to write to one of the ports and then was able to execute her own code. And then so she loaded ROM dumper code, got it out the old-fashioned way. Absolutely lovely. And who knew that was going to like kick off a decade of Tamagotchi Hacks,? A
friend of mine worked for a British catalog shop during that period in the 90s. And they had to put up a notice because people would bring back their Tamagotchis for a refund after they died. They had to put up a notice, notice pointing out that somewhere in the battery compartment was a reset button.
Nice. One of the neighbor kids was so sad when his Tamagotchi died. His mom was like, you know, trying to convince him that one of the goals of the game was to get it to be able to fly. Oh, it's dead. It's an angel. It gets wings when you kill it. But he was like so stoked that he got it to fly.
My final hack today comes from NKT Builds. It's a classic piece of pushing the boundaries of radio, which always tickles my interest. What they've done is they've got a Bluetooth tag and a Bluetooth tag reader. The snag is those two are 12 kilometers apart. Obviously, this isn't a standard…
well, they mentioned this in the video. You can't do it legally with that antenna. Yeah,
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