Ancient Web: Katherine Drake Kept Tamagotchi Lives in Daily Web Diaries
Katherine Drake's Mimitchi.com began in 1996 and preserves character guides, virtual-pet diaries starting in 1997, old Furby material, fan stories, awards, and web-ring culture.
Part of the Ancient Web Collection.
A Tamagotchi can live a short, eventful life on a keychain. Katherine Drake decided those lives deserved an archive, complete with character pictures and daily reports.
The site's homepage dates its first creation to June 26, 1996; it records later index designs from November 1997 and April 1999. Its Tamagotchi Planet is still actively annotated, including updates in 2026, but maintains the busy graphics and link-by-link navigation of the original hobby Web.
Visitors are greeted as fellow life forms and invited to choose a path through numerous handheld virtual-pet varieties: the original 1990s models, Angelgotchi, Ocean, Morino, Osutchi and Mesutchi, Connection, and later Japanese releases.
Every pet has a biography
The Tamagotchi Logs index says there are more than 180 entries about the owner's devices. The logs pair everyday experiences with the progress of specific creatures. A separate Mimitchi memorial explains why the author's first virtual pet became important enough to give the site its name.
Drake also preserved fan fiction, crossword games, illustrations, early scanned images, and links to other collectors. The index still labels an old list of fan sites as out of date, rather than quietly replacing its historical neighbors with social-platform profiles.
The Electronic Furby section is practically another website within the website. It explicitly dates its launch to November 3, 1998 and advertises a picture-supported manual, a Furbish-to-English dictionary, sound recordings, translated stories, poll results, a newsletter, guestbook, and web rings. A 2002 update notice sits over features built for the late-1990s toy craze.
That section includes claims of coverage by a Japanese newspaper and British television in 1999. They are the site's own documented notices, not proof that every old publicity link remains available.
The crucial historical detail is personal attention. Character logs, manuals, awards, and guestbook invitations were held together by one owner, not a corporate fan portal. Even ongoing maintenance hasn't erased that human structure.
Explore Tamagotchi Planet and the surviving Furby room.
Part of the Ancient Web Collection.
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