Bandai Namco recently announced that its newest Tamagotchi Paradise device was found to include a bug that causes the game to act strangely when pets in certain age brackets above 256 pass away.
Typically, when a Tamagotchi over 30 years old dies, the player receives a bonus “peaceful death scene,” unlocks the Happy Tama Star achievement, and if the Tamagotchi being cared for is near death, they get a one-time opportunity to save the pet.
However, due to the glitch, Tamagotchi over 256 will appear sad and will not show their accurate age on the death screen when they expire. In addition, those that die in the age ranges of 256-285, 512-541, and 768-797 won’t receive a Happy Tama Star, nor will the rescue animation be shown if the pet is in critical condition.
The number “256” is significant because it represents the total number of values that can be stored in one byte of data. In other words, it’s possible that some parts of the game, such as death-screen displays or animations, may be compressing age values down to a single byte internally. As a result, a 269-year-old Tamagotchi could end up being treated as though it were only 13 years old, which is the age displayed on some glitched Tamagotchi.
That same logic would also explain why the bug only occurs within the specific age ranges of “256-285,” “512-541,” and “768-797.” In all of these ranges, the lower 8 bits of the age value correspond to numbers between 0 and 29, causing the game to mistakenly judge the Tamagotchi as being under 30 years old.
Interestingly, the main Tamagotchi-raising screen still displays ages above 256 correctly, suggesting the game’s save data supports much larger numbers. It may simply be that some systems were written under the assumption that values between 0 and 255 would be more than sufficient. Given the long history of the Tamagotchi series, it’s also possible that code from older games was reused.
Unfortunately, Bandai Namco has no plans to replace the defective Tamagotchi Paradise devices, but has apologized that the glitch “resulted in a product that falls short of expectations.”
Mido