Alessi × BANDAI

Announced April 10, 1997 at the Salone del Mobile in Milan, the SG 58 Pulcino was shown on a long white table laid for breakfast, twelve units in twelve egg cups between real boiled eggs. Alberto Alessi had watched the Tamagotchi queues in Tokyo that winter and wrote to Bandai the following week. Giovannoni's brief ran to one line: the egg must come home. The Salone units ran stock Japanese firmware; the new chick did not hatch until the autumn shipment.

Giovannoni left the Bandai board alone and redrew the shell around it. It grew to 58 millimetres, the height of a large hen's egg, and was cast in translucent tangerine PMMA so the circuit shows as a faint shadow. He moved the three buttons into a slight downward curve under the screen, which turned the whole front into a face without anyone drawing one. Aki Maita insisted the eight care icons stay exactly as in Japan, so they were pad-printed in grey around the window, a rare case of Alessi accepting a stranger's graphics unchanged.

The ball chain went. In its place is a mirror-polished steel cup from Crusinallo, on three ball feet, its wall pierced with eight Girotondo figures, one for each care icon. A magnet in the base, borrowed from the Lilliput salt cellars, trips a reed switch in the shell and wakes the pet from pause when it is set down, so the chick greets you on its return to the table. Domus called it the first Alessi object that could die; Italian parents pointed out that it usually did so during lunch.

Bandai drew the new sprites in Tokyo: the hatched creature is a round chick, and one adult form resembles the Anna G corkscrew, raising its arms when content. Collectors have since established that this form appears only if the owner never once uses the discipline icon, which makes it the rarest thing Mendini never designed.