When most of us picture the birth of Digimon, we picture the anime: eight kids, a camp, a stranded bus. But the franchise was almost ten months old before that first TV episode aired. On June 26, 1997, Bandai put the Digital Monster on Japanese store shelves — a keychain-sized virtual pet that owed almost nothing to the show, and everything to Tamagotchi.
Tamagotchi, also Bandai's, had swallowed the toy market. It was, in the company's own reading, a pet aimed at girls. So a small team inside WiZ, the house that built Tamagotchi, started asking a straightforward question: what would the boys' version look like? The answer was not a gentler pet — it was a fighter.
From Otokotchi to a monster you could battle with
The device began life under the working name "Otokotchi," literally "boy's Tamagotchi," before the team landed on "Capsule Zaurus." That in turn became "Digital Monster" when the group realized the name risked stepping on another company's trademark. The lineup behind it reads like a who's-who of the franchise's future: Makoto Kitagawara and Kenji Watanabe from WiZ, with Ayumu Horimura supervising on Bandai's side. Kitagawara had been pulled off debugging and spec documents for the second generation of Tamagotchi — the job that put the pitch for a male-oriented pet in the room in the first place. Watanabe, meanwhile, was handed the monster design, and he raided American comics for his references: Spawn, Simon Bisley, Mike Mignola. The first two creatures he drew were Tyranomon and Agumon.
A pet you were meant to lose
The hardware had three buttons and a tiny monochrome screen. You raised a Digimon from an egg, fed it, trained it, cleaned up after it — then the trick appeared. The Digital Monster was built to connect to other units and fight. Careless raids could injure your partner, and an over-battled Digimon could die for good. The stakes were physical: a real fight against a real friend, winner and loser decided by a two-inch screen. That one difference — a virtual pet that didn't just sit there being cute, but that could take and dish out damage — was the whole franchise in a nutshell.
A hit that outran the toy aisle
It worked. Bandai sold 14 million of the 1997 models by 2004, thirteen million of them in Japan alone. And the formula got refined fast. In 1998 came the Pendulum, whose built-in shake-to-count pendulum added higher evolution stages and introduced Jogress — slots that let two Digimon combine. Five Pendulum versions followed, each themed around a digital "soul" such as Nature Spirits or Nightmare Soldiers. That framework of evolution into nebulous, connected branches is the exact skeleton the anime and games would later inherit.
Even the early Western names tell the story: among the first localizations, Devimon became "Darkmon" and Monzaemon became "Teddymon" — compromises that were quietly abandoned once the shows made the originals famous. An anniversary edition of the original pet shipped on June 26, 2017, exactly twenty years to the day.
So before the Digivices, before the crests, before "I choose you" ever applied to a digital monster, there was a clunky keychain that grew up with you and fought beside you. The anime gets the credit. The V-Pet did the work. When most of us picture the birth of Digimon, we picture the anime: eight kids, a camp, a stranded bus. But the franchise was already nearly two years old when that first TV episode aired. On June 26, 1997, Bandai put the Digital Monster on Japanese store shelves — a keychain-sized virtual pet that owed almost nothing to the show, and everything to Tamagotchi.