I saw a post by Ben Daubney that brought back suppressed memories – a screensaver called MOPy, that was controversial due to it’s way you would feed and nurture your virtual pet.
As Ben stated on his post:-
To make your MOPy goldfish happy, you had to buy accessories and food using points generated by making Multiple Original Prints on your (ideally HP) printer. For a while, every kid was spending every lunchtime printing out a single character on a sheet of A4 over and over again just to get enough points to give their virtual fish some virtual bubbles, and hundreds if not thousands of pages were tossed into the bin.
13 year old me didn’t have a printer, so I seemed to remember if the fish went without food, water or their environment enriched by printing out waste of paper, the fish would die. It was incredibly distressing seeing a fish on the surface of the screensaver.
Anyway, there’s a gallows humour joke to be made how a virtual fish ate resources, so ChatGPT could boil the oceans. I’ve not had enough coffee to make it, however.
RIP MOPy Fish, we hardly knew ye.