I made Tamagotchi in Excel

Added: 2026-05-30

[00:00:00]Well, if it isn't Tamagotchi, her new favorite pet.

[00:00:04]>> Yes.

[00:00:04]>> So, what's that make me? Fish dicks?

[00:00:06]Today, I'm attempting something that nobody has asked for, turning Microsoft Excel into a fully functional Tamagotchi simulation game. And by the end of this video, we'll have three Tamagotchis running simultaneously inside a spreadsheet. Because, apparently, I've reached the stage of life where this feels like a productive use of time. For anyone too young to remember, Tamagotchi was the 1996 virtual pet that somehow convinced an entire generation of kids to become emotionally attached to a tiny plastic egg. You had to feed it, clean it, play with it, and if you ignored it for too long, it out alived. Which, looking back, was an incredibly harsh life lesson for children. These things sold over 100 million units worldwide.

[00:00:44]So, naturally, the only logical thing to do is rebuild the entire experience inside Excel. Because Microsoft definitely intended spreadsheets for an advanced alien life simulation tool. So, we begin the same way with every bad life decision. In Excel, with a completely blank workbook. We crack our knuckles, unlock the developer tab, open VBA, and immediately start continuing with this terrible decision. Remember, at this point, Excel is still technically a spreadsheet, but that won't last long. Soon, it will be a game engine. First, we need the basics. We need hunger, we need happiness, we need health, we need age, and of course, we need poop management. Because no Tamagotchi experience is complete without cleaning up tiny digital turds every 30 seconds. Then, we need some animation. We need menus, we need buttons, we need timers, and we need a stat system. Suddenly, Excel has started looking much less like accounting software and much more like a low-budget game engine. All right, we officially have a working Tamagotchi inside Microsoft Excel, which honestly feels like something that should void my license. Anyway, let me show you around.

[00:01:39]We've got feeding, cleaning, medicine, healing, happiness system, sleep cycles, evolving pets, and real-time stat decay.

[00:01:47]Which means, if you neglect your pet for even a few minutes, things go downhill very quickly. And just like in life, stay on top of your macros, people. At first, things actually seem pretty manageable. We feed the pet, we keep it happy, we clean up after it, and we simply try not to accidentally unalive it. Simple, maybe too simple. And that's when I realized something was missing.

[00:02:06]The gameplay loop of pain and difficulty. So, I decided to introduce difficulty modes. We had easy mode, which stays exactly like what we've played so far. We had medium, which forces you to manage two Tamagotchis at the same time. And hard mode. Hard mode gives you three simultaneous Tamagotchis to keep alive inside one Excel workbook.

[00:02:24]This all sounds reasonable until they all start screaming for different things at once. At this point, the project has evolved from a cute nostalgic remake to a spreadsheet-based psychological game.

[00:02:32]There's an alarming amount of engineering dedicated specifically to virtual pet poop. And somehow it actually works. Fun fact, according to the official Tamagotchi lore, these creatures are actually a tiny alien species that deposits eggs on Earth to learn what human life is like. Which raises a very important question. Why did we suddenly start imprisoning them inside Excel? All right, it's time.

[00:02:52]Let's attempt hard mode. Three Tamagotchis, one spreadsheet, questionable mental stability. Let's see how long this lasts. You can see all the stats on the right-hand side and how they decay differently for each Tamagotchi.

[00:03:06]And as they decay, we have five buttons we can press to help keep them alive.

[00:03:09]First, we have snack time, which increases how fed each pet is, but also reduces their health. A bit like a cheeky snack that you know you shouldn't eat. Dinner time only changes the hunger, increases the fed bar by two.

[00:03:22]Play time only changes happiness, increasing the happiness meter by two.

[00:03:27]While the clean button completely removes all negative hygiene buffs on the pet. Health returns the health of the pets to a maximum of five and also heals a sneaky hidden mechanic, which is the sickness meter.

[00:03:39]Age is the pets have a maximum age of 50. They go from a newly born chick to a young pet, a medium-age pet, an older pet, an old pet, and finally into the beyond. There's also a sickness mechanic in the background, as I mentioned. A random effect that impacts all skills.

[00:03:55]You have to keep a watch for it. You may not have noticed, but both pet one and pet two get sick throughout this run.

[00:04:01]Much of this playthrough has been about managing that third pet. The quickest by far to decay in their stats. Also the quickest to age up.

[00:04:09]A fun part of this challenge is playing this game in the background whilst trying to maintain your attention on something else. It quickly gets out of hand. Where you have sick and hungry pets demanding your attention. And that's what got me in the end. Try to have a conversation in the background, which is never a good idea when you have Tamagotchis in need.

[00:04:30]I genuinely did not expect this to become so stressful. Honestly, I'm kind of shocked at how well Excel has handled this. At this point, I'm one formula away from turning Microsoft Excel into a full game engine, which is probably a dangerous thing to realize. And yes, if you want to experience the spreadsheet nightmare yourself, the game is completely free to download from my blog using the link in the description below.

[00:04:48]Depending on your PC settings, you may need to open the workbook, save a new version, enable macros, and then begin your descent into Excel-based pet management chaos. And for anyone interested in coding, as usual, all the VBA is unlocked, so you can explore exactly how this works yourself. Or just judge my programming language decisions.

[00:05:05]Both are acceptable. If you've enjoyed watching me slowly transform Excel into something it was never meant to become, leave a like and subscribe. And let me know in the comments below, how long do you think you'd actually survive in hard mode?