> MOPy the virtual pet that was an environmental disaster
> LINK · 'MOPy fish' on Wikipedia)
Something suddenly remembered: this screensaver released by HP in 1997. All my friends installed this on their preferred computer in the PC room at school and it made the sole ICT teacher frantic.
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. Richard at one point removed part of the printer so that his prints would fall straight into the trashcan so he could speed up the process.
Wiki says MOPy was downloaded more than 10 million times. Scary to think about how much paper, ink, and electricity was wasted.