Call of Duty: Modern Warfare’s watches that the playable characters can wear have already been the subject of conversation before, but it looks like there are even more to them than the developers initially let on. These watches will actually function as a Tamagotchi clone called a “Tamagunchi.” This companion on players’ wrists, should they choose to equip it to their character, will react to how a player is doing in-game whether they’re on a killstreak or have gone a while without getting any kills at all.
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Game Informer spoke to Infinity Ward about the reactive watches and learned how these Tamagunchis came to be in Modern Warfare. Art director Joel Emslie said the team “put in a watch pretty early on” and a coder went from there to add a system that synced up the watch’s time with the displayed time of whatever system the player was using. That’s what players already knew the watches were capable of after Emslie confirmed that feature prior to it evolving into the responsive Tamagunchi.
“This little thing on your wrist, every time you get a string of kills, it goes, ‘Ya-ta!’ and it makes a little noise, then you look at it, and it evolved out of an egg,” Emslie told Game Informer. “Tamagunchis are fed by the player’s performance in multiplayer. It’s just this little active wristwatch thing.”
There is some level of maintenance involved with these Tamagunchis, though it’s not nearly as involved as an actual Tamagotchi would be. You do have to keep feeding these wristwatches by getting kills though because “If you don’t take care of your Tamagunchi, it will rot and die,” Emslie added.
If that sounds like a bit more than you want to deal with or you just don’t want your wrist companion critiquing you when you go on a deathstreak, you don’t have to equip one of these at all. The feature is also only available in the game’s multiplayer or Spec-Ops modes, so you won’t have a Tamagunchi when you’re playing the campaign mode that’s supposed to be tackling some darker themes. More on that campaign mode should be shared soon, according to Infinity Ward.
