In the early 2000s computers could do anything. They could bring you to webrings of increasingly niche fansites. They could calculate directions to Pizza Hut on MapQuest or deliver you answers to important questions from a guy named Jeeves. They could even house little virtual pets who would scamper across your monitor while you surfed the web. Wow! Computers!
Desktop pets of that early internet era were mostly little novelties—looping animations that you could minimize to your tray and forget about until you opened your task manager—not actual games. Eventually, they were subsumed by the rise of simulation games, and the job of caring for cute little dudes inside the family PC went to full-on games like Catz and Dogz or social platforms like Neopets. Handheld gaming took off, and then smartphones, and desktop pets went into hibernation as cooler tech took center stage.
The year is 2025 and somehow desktop pets are popping off on PCs all over again.
- Rusty's Retirement became one of my favorite cozy games of 2024
- Ropuka's Idle Island was the obsession of half the PC Gamer team earlier this month
- Tiny Pasture just launched last week with taskbar frolicking critters
- Bao Bao's Cozy Laundromat is launching next week with giant pandas running a coin laundry (and a demo right now in the Steam Next Fest)
All four are part of a very sudden and specific trend: combining the convenience of a cute desktop pet that sits on top of your other applications without demanding your full focus and the passive progression of an idler game.
Rusty's Retirement, a desktop farming game, snaps to the bottom of your monitor where you can scroll side-to-side to unlock new parcels of land to build Rusty the robot's fellow autonomous farming creatures. They tick away planting and harvesting crops while you mind your online shopping or whathaveyou. Bao Bao's Cozy Laundromat appears quite similar, an idle shop sim snapped to the bottom of your screen where you can manage it at your leisure.
Ropuka and Tiny Pasture hew even closer to the desktop pet roots—Ropuka as a moveable little island that you can resize and stash anywhere on your monitor you like and Tiny Pasture as a very minimal visual demand where rabbits and dogs frolick along your task bar for you to care for Tamagotchi-style or stow away into your application tray as needed.
It's such an obviously perfect pairing, idle games and desktop pets, that I'm shocked it took this long to happen. And as if by divine inspiration, a ton of developers all had the same thought simultaneously to bring these cute little creations out within months of each other.
I'm enamoured with this crop of virtual pet idlers for being so quintessentially PC. There are literally hundreds of idle games on Steam, phones, and consoles, but the desktop pet is an experience that only really makes sense on the multi-purpose screen real estate of a computer. No matter what I'm doing at my desk—shopping, gaming, working, socializing—there's always room in the corner for my frog friend to mow his lawn. Last week, I watched a little critter take a dump on the article I was writing in Google Docs. This is a joy and a burden reserved for users of personal computers.
With this initial little boom of desktop pets all racing to fill my desktop this spring I know there are bound to be more on the way this summer and the rest of the year. We did it, folks; we've bred and saved an endangered species of PC games!
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