The original Tamagotchi was a small, round handheld device on a keychain. 90s kids will fondly remember having one or more dangling off their book bags (before they inevitably got banned from school, along with Pokemon cards, Bey Blades etc.).

The virtual pet would develop from a little pixelated egg to a little pixelated animal, provided you took good care of it.

If you didn’t adhere to the pet's whims, it would die. This was signified with a heart-breaking animation that in retrospect was pretty brutal for children to see, showing a grave and the spirit of the dead animal flying away.

For the 20th anniversary of the original, Bandai hope to resurrect the craze with a free to download Tamagotchi app called 'My Tamagotchi Forever'. The advertising campaign relies heavily on nostalgia, the storyline of the commercial being a young girl playing with the Tamagotchi in 1997, then growing up and playing the smartphone app with her daughter twenty years later.

The simple 3-buttoned game probably wouldn’t cut it for today’s tech-savvy kids, so the new game includes plenty of new features to keep them occupied. Similar to Animal Crossing, the pet can walk around town, making friends with others. Following the success of Pokemon Go there is also an AR element to the game as the commercial shows.

But if you want to take a trip back to the original LCD charm, Bandai also re-released the original device earlier this year.

But before we raise a new generation of virtual pets, let's take a moment of silence for all the Tamagotchis left for dead when the trend died out last time.