Tamatown, short for Tamagotchi Town, was a simplistic web game from the mid 2000s that used a passcode system in conjunction with the Tamagotchi Connection devices. Once you had a code, you could enter onto the website to take your Tamagotchi into the virtual world of Tamatown. The interactive town had various ways to earn items and coins that you could take back to your physical Tamagotchi devices.
Connection devices marked the peak point on Tamagotchi’s impact for local and “wireless” gameplay. Bandai found a way to connect devices to the internet without needing an internet connection. What made it more interesting was when you finished playing on Tamatown, the user would have a passcode upon exiting the game to enter onto their device. These passcodes would know which random 10 items you collected to give to your Tamagotchi. Insane to think!
The original Tamatown ran from 2006 to 2008 before the Version 5 devices came out. (The Guardian) Tamagotchi’s newest feature was a family mechanic which allowed the user to manage 3-5 characters on one device. Version 5 would get its own Tamatown, referred to as Tama and Earth Expo, shown below.
The Current recovery efforts
As of 2024, only partial parts of the original Tamatown have been restored. Lost Media Wiki shows the remaining locations that are missing. They include:
- Arcade
- School
- Foodcourt
- Travel Center
- Town Hall
- Theatre
- Pre school
- Office
- Station
- Bank
- Hospital
- Post office
- Clothing Store
User Loociano on Github has been documenting the restoration process for all the old files from Tama Towns V3-4 and V5. His Github page is useful for users who want to mess around with what is available to play. You can find the currently documented files on this Mega link.
Unpacking the files from Loociano’s link will require a flash plugin to run the swf files. I would recommend using this debug executable that you can download from Wayback Machine. Its is worth noting that this process for displaying content will still be mostly unplayable. You are only capable of seeing the flash animations from selected scenes, which are usually corrupted with undefined variables.
[A future video will demonstrate how to see the files]
A common misconception online is that Loociano is actively working on the Tamatown Rewritten. As Community member, HWD45 states:
Some confusion I’ve seen with regard to Tamatown is the extent to which they can be “revived”. Certainly, there’s been attempts at reviving the site in the past, and some of them were pretty good – what people often misunderstand, though, is that none of these revivals were able to recover anything that was already lost. Tama-Palace in particular wrote several articles hyping up Loociano’s revival as though it’d only be a matter of weeks before Tamatown was completely up any running again, but the fact of the matter was that the only files he was hosting were ones that had already been archived. –Tamatalk, Archiving Tamatown
Can you play Tamatown Mini games?
The Spriters Resource has 2 minigame assets dumped, but nothing playable. Both assets are for the Soccer and Claw mini games. To my current knowledge, no Tamatown mini game has been recovered or playable. They are not present on Blue Maxima’s Flashpoint, which is a large library of flash games. You can read about why Flashpoint is important here.
If you have any information on playable games, please reach out to us!
The Modern Solution for Tamagotchi Connection Users
mamemamelabs.com created by user Shroomtchi (HWD405) offers Password generators for the lost media. The importance for tools like these are to acquire items that are no longer obtainable from logging into the old the Tamatown. Not all items are obtainable, some still lost to time, but it is a useful tool for Gotchi points.
They also created a useful website: Mame Mame Library to document what is currently known about the state of Tamatown. HWD put together a FAQ for Tamatown’s revival that is worth checking out. It answers a lot of common questions for what’s next.
What's next?
There’s two logical routes that can be taken with Tamatown.
- Recreate the experience with whats currently available.
- Recover more files to piece together the original.
The unfortunate nature of Tamatown’s flashgame hosted web game will create a hard task for finding the original files. It will likely require insider information being shared with the public. Hopefully Bandai offers a legacy solution for their Hardcore fans, but that is unlikely. The likely route will be to recreate assets for players who want to have a nostalgia-trip.