As a child, my biggest fear was video game glitches. I would spend hours on Youtube and Bulbapedia, learning all I could about glitches so I wouldn't be afraid if they showed up. But before any of that, before I even had internet access, the origin of this fear would arise.

Okay, picture this: I am a young child sitting in the back seat of the family car. It is nighttime, and I am playing my Tamagotchi in the light of passing streetlamps. I go to feed the little guy, but instead of the food options showing up, the screen shows "Ball" with the image of a beach ball (from the "play" menu). Not knowing what else to do, I press the button to select the ball. An animation plays of my Tamagotchi EATING THE BALL. Then, my Tamagotchi immediately evolves into a horrible thing- a strange collection of pixels that looked sick. When it came up close to the screen, it was round like a beach ball with a wavy mouth that looked to be expelling air. I freaked out, which make my little sister freak out too, and our parents tried their best to calm us from the front seat while not really understanding what was going on. I ended up burying the device in the seats and trying not to be scared the rest of the way home.

There are only a few mentions of the "ball glitch" online, all of which are posts on a tamagotchi forum. My Tamagotchi had grown into Shitekitchi which to be fair, is very hard to parse as a tiny sprite with no context clues. I still have the device ->, which works perfectly fine.