If You Stop Vaping This Tamagotchi Dies

There is a cursed vape somewhere in NYC that holds the soul of a Tamagotchi. If you stop vaping, the digital pet dies. Only engineers who once worked for Meta and weapons manufacturer Anduril could create a machine so heinous.

And that’s exactly what they did at the annual NYU Stupid Hackathon last month. Stupid hackathons are a tradition in the software engineer, hacker, and maker space. Every year across the country people come together to use their skills to make very dumb things. Past inventions include a machine that makes you look like you pissed yourself when you wanna get out of small talk, a selfie stick for a beer can, and a head mounted rack that makes it look like you’re seeing through a long intestinal tract.

The NYU Stupid Hackathon is organized by the Interactive Telecommunications Program at the Tisch School of the Arts. It went on for 12 hours and included creations such as a table that never stops shaking and a printer that drafts legally binding documents to track pink promises. But the “vape or die” Tamagotchi was the belle of the ball.

The machine is the invention of former Meta employee Rebecca Xun and former Anduril employee Lucia Camacho. They had originally conceived the machine as a way to help Xun quit vaping. “Originally, the idea was to do this for good, because I would like to quit vaping,” Xun told Washington Square Times. “But it’s more fun and more stupid if we use this power and harness it for evil and make myself more addicted.”

A traditional Tamagotchi needs many different kinds of love. It needs to be watered, fed, played with, and groomed. Users have to clean up its poops and balance its various health meters. Xun and Camacho’s digital pet only has one desire: that you keep huffing the vape. When you don’t, its face fills the screen and huge wet tears shoot out the side of its eyes.

You can see an early version of the machine in this video from NYU students of the hackathon. “It’s very intense,” Camacho says in the video as an animation of the Tamagotchi crying plays on screen. For the original version of the project, the duo connected a vape to a computer which ran a digital pet.

They’ve iterated since then and now have a version that’s self-contained though it looks a bit like a brick of C4 with a crying cartoon on it. They used a pink Elf Bar BC5000 vape and strapped a tiny screen to it. Wires run from the screen to some basic components on the back of the Elf Bar.

The Tamaogtchi that dies if you stop puffing was the breakout star of the Stupid Hackathon. Xunn and Camacho got a lot of attention, but Xun told Futurism that the experience hadn’t been all positive. Remember, before the Hackathon she wanted to use a digital pet to help her stop vaping. “Because we tested it so much, we were both diseased from vaping,” she said.