https://www.cnet.com/news/we-tried-out-apples-memoji-on-ios-12-its-already-pretty-great-compared-to-nintendo/

Everyone's making avatars now: Nintendo started it with its Mii in 2006, on the wildly popular Wii console. Microsoft quickly "borrowed" that idea for Xbox Avatars. Bitmoji -- first an independent company, later purchased by Snap -- popularized the personalized emojis on mobile devices. And Apple's Animoji, Samsung's AR Emoji and Facebook's Oculus VR avatars all followed. 

In that light, Apple's new Memoji are hardly surprising. But what they are is pretty fun.