New App Remakes the Tamagotchi for the Smartphone Era

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Name: Photogotchi

Quick Pitch: Tamagotchi game meets camera app.

Genius Idea: This free smartphone game encourages users to snap pictures and feed the images to their Photogotchi, a digital creature inspired by the Tamagotchi, to make it grow.

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Remember Tamagotchis, and how obsessed kids were with feeding them so they could watch them grow up? Well, Tamagotchi's may have disappeared, but now their relative is here – the Photogotchi.

The free gaming app transforms your pictures into pixel-art images, which are then fed to your Photogotchi – a digital creature inspired by the Tamagotchi — to make it grow. The more photos you feed the Photogotchi, the bigger and more colorful it becomes.

Users can adopt and name their own Photogotchi once they download the app, and then choose a color which determines the type of creature they get. You can take photos of anything you like, and then turn them into unique images using five different 8-bit filters in the app.

The goal of the game is to earn points by taking as many photos as you want to feed your pet. In the process, it motivates users to become active photographers in their day-to-day lives.

There are a number of ways to earn points in the game, including taking a lot of photos, sharing them on different social networks or snapping pictures at night. The more points you have, the bigger your creature will get. You can watch as your Photogotchi starts off as an egg, cracks and then grows up.

The company is planning to add a feature that will allow users with the same color Photogotchi's to play a game against teams with different colors.

Photogotchi was developed in August by CarnationGroup, a digital agency in Europe. The team was inspired by the Tamagotchi craze in the nineties and wanted to bring back the nostalgia of the popular virtual pets by incorporating them into a fun game.

CarnationGroup doesn't have a business model in place for the app yet, but the team is considering making t-shirts for users with photos of their Photogotchi's.

The app will be released for iPhones on October 1 and for Windows phones a couple days later.

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