The entry into the 21st century was somewhat complex. Preparations for the turn of the millennium began in the late 1990s, but what many did not expect was that it would be as significant a change as it turned out to be. While terrorism took on a new dimension on a social level after the Twin Towers, the world was undergoing the greatest revolution of the last few centuries: the digital leap.
This great leap soon materialized in the form of the Internet, a revolution that ended up making a mark on everyone and meant that we all carry a cell phone in our pockets at all times. However, the digital leap also came in the form of toys, and there are two that made the difference with respect to the rest: the tamagotchi and the furby.
While the first of these toys was a digital pet that gave rise to a phenomenon that would come later in the form of Pokémon, Digimon and much more, the second was directly a robot suitable for all audiences. With an early Artificial Intelligence version that was almost like the ChatGPT of the time, Furby became the pet of many… and although it had an obvious creepy side, few children of the time were aware of it.
What happened to the Furby?
With its characteristic resemblance to gremlins -although its creators claim that it is closer to a hamster or an owl- the Furby was an indispensable toy for children in the nineties. It was a little monster that treated us as its masters, so it was at our service, as if it were M3gan.
We, as creatures with hardly any awareness of responsibility, were in charge of making sure they lacked for nothing. However, they were so real that they even caused nightmares. After all, they were robots that moved, blinked and even talked.
Designed by the American company Tiger Electronics, the Furby managed to sell more than forty million units in its first three years of life. As the newspapers of the time noted, it was the first successful attempt to produce and sell a robot domestically. Although engineers had been trying to commercialize experiments similar to the Furby for years, it was not until the release of this invention that they realized that it was possible to conquer children with robotics.
A technological milestone
The entertainment offered by the Furby was indisputable, but its merit went beyond that. It was an engineering milestone; the first toy capable of conquering the world with cutting-edge technology. Its success demonstrated what would be confirmed in the following years: that the children of the bubble were going to bring with them the evolution from analog to digital.
The Furby incorporated a very unique language system. At first it had the ability to speak in its own language, Furbish. But as you spent time with him and spoke to him in your own language, he would replace those strange words with the language of the user in question. No wonder we kids of the time tried the same strategy with our dogs, birds or turtles.
In addition, the toy also incorporated an infrared system with which it could communicate with other toys of its “species”. If a child had more than one of these toys, he could watch them talk to each other under his astonished gaze. Thanks to its original systems, revolutionary for the time -but soon outdated-, the Furby became a companion of adventures like we had never imagined having.
Any room of a child born in the late 1990s had one of these specimens. In the first year alone, the company sold more than 27 million units. Although their initial price was thirty dollars -not cheap compared to the low price of a Tamagotchi or an action figure-, when they ran out of stock in many toy stores, a fierce resale market opened up.
By Christmas 1998, the toy fetched over a hundred dollars second-hand. Its advertising was so effective that no parent could deny their child the purchase of one of these dolls at Christmas.
Following Hasbro’s purchase of Tiger Electronics, the toy reached a much wider spectrum than was intended. Over the years, the Furby has evolved into new generations that, in some cases, have been relatively successful. But no third or fourth generation Furby, no matter how many LCD panels in the eyes, has reached the transcendence of the toys that brought Artificial Intelligence into homes.
