I can barely remember signing up for Neopets. I saw the yellow banner on another site when I first had access to an internet-enabled computer and signed up with a terrible username and poorly named pets. I do remember getting straight into it. In a time before Newbie Packs and Neocash, I’m pretty sure my first activity was a Brain Tree Quest. I probably haven’t done many since.
Over the years, like all of us, my interest came and went. At university, I went through an intense period of running a guild. It probably contributed to a number of missed lectures, but I was wrapped up in the importance of keeping members of the MSS Guild on track with the vital tasks of helping people on the quest boards and sending cookies to newbies - so much more engaging that lectures on sociolinguistics.
Eventually, I must have lost interest, or maybe I didn't have internet access, or something else happened because I didn’t look at or think about the site for a really long time during its Nickelodeon era. If I tried to log on, nothing worked, it lagged, the boards were dead, and eventually there was some sort of password recovery issue in the distant past that locked me out seemingly forever.
I’m 40 now. A few years ago, my cousin messaged me and said, "Neopets is popping off again, get back on it." I found Neopets Nation, raised a ticket, gave Alice every email address I’d ever had in my life, and somehow got back into my original main account, MSS Neomails, collection of Cheery Plants, and hungry Neopets included.
The last year or so has been a wild ride for most of us who are rejoining the site after years of having to be adults out in the world. We’re getting jobs, raising children, and generally not having the time to sit in our parents' living room taking up the phone line with static images of cartoon pets. We are out here, 25 years on, introducing our kids to the same website that we were playing, where barely anything has changed. Can you think of another game like that? I tried to play Bubble Bubble on the Sega Master System with my 11-year-old son once, and the disdain was almost enough to make me give up nostalgic gaming forever. But not quite…
I think there are several reasons Neopets has such enduring appeal to people and why this current resurgence might just start bringing new users to the site in a way we haven’t seen for years (and yes, I did have to check myself for thinking, do I want that?)
Nothing Has Really Changed
Neopets’ ability to remain almost completely unchanged over the last two decades significantly adds to the appeal for us returners, who have watched multiplayer online games change from point-and-click HTML pages to virtual reality worlds. The absolute ease and familiarity of getting into your childhood Neopets account, going straight to your Shop Till, checking your Sales History, Stock portfolio, Food Club etc has kept us coming back for over 20 years!
There’s something else that hasn’t changed, for me anyway, and it’s the enduring confusion of explaining Neopets to someone who hasn’t heard of it before. Even now, in an era where the average person regularly spends on microtransactions in mobile phone games, where we all know about Fortnite, Roblox, Minecraft, and how immersive they can be for both children and adults, explaining the urgency of having to log on to an HTML-based pet game can be awkward.
“So, you have a pet, and you can dress it up, and you have a shop where you buy things and sell them, and then you get Neopoints to buy more things. Oh, and there’s battling and a stock market and faeries and stamps and avatars and this picture of a guy sticking his finger up that kind of sums it all up really…”
We know it makes no sense. Realistically, we don’t want people to fully understand it. You can’t, unless you have a no-trade Astronomy Club sitting in your Safety Deposit Box or a vague memory of going into Claire’s and finding all the Neopets notepads at half price because no one in your town played Neopets.
Pure Escapism
Life for millennials and Generation Y has been a roller coaster. I know, the same can be said for every generation from the Industrial Revolution onwards, but let’s be frank: we grew up in the age of the internet and it totally changed everything. Most of us would have started with a family computer on the kitchen table. The internet was full of Americans and pornography and forums, and it offered an escape from reality into a world where your a/s/l meant more than what you looked like—where you could be a 24-year-old from France sitting in your parents’ dining chair in deepest Swindon. Now, with many of us connected to the web 24 hours a day for work, recreation, travel, hobbies, and recording our key life moments, there are hundreds of reasons to be online every day. But those moments spent visiting an abandoned digital plushie in a forgotten digital tree are the ones that we really love.
It Changed Our Lives
So many of the players I have spoken to from Neopets Nation and Reddit are now working in tech. For me, those early hours spent on Lissy’s HTML Help building my first tables were formative in terms of my career, and I continue to credit Neopets with my interest in coding and web design. I know it’s the same for many of us—our first forays into coding in honor of our pixelated pets. One of my pet pages still exists out there, a testimony to my early coding skills and, let’s be honest, a showcase for what I can still achieve with HTML now that web coding has moved on so massively. It's about the Lost Isle plot. Remember that? Refresh your memory by visiting Twinklyspangle's Journey To The Lost Isle Plot Page. Many of us can credit our current careers to our early piqued interest in the web, the hours spent on Neopets crafting our signatures, designing our lookups, and delving into the source code to find hidden secrets.
Enduring Friendships
At the time, especially in the UK, it was quite unusual to have friends in real life that you also spoke to online. In my early exploration of the late ’90s internet, I spent a lot of time on Pink Poogle Toy forums and a few more generic forum sites. I don’t recall a huge number of other UK-based members, and I don’t think I thought anyone from England was playing Neopets at the time! Then one day, I was sitting in my university computer lab, and I glanced around—something caught my eye. A yellow sidebar, a purple creature in the center of the screen…was she…was that a Mazzew? Did I just catch one in the wild? Not only had I met another player, but it was also one who had the ability to restock rare items! Sarah and I were firm friends for most of university. One weekend, we took her younger sister and a friend to Thorpe Park. We used her mum’s Nectar Vouchers and listened to the whole Streets album on the drive down.
Minty_murray eventually moved to Utrecht, and we lost touch. Are you out there, Sarah?
I know this is just one tiny story that we have as a collective. Friends, best friends, relationships, even a couple of babies that I have heard of, joined together by this silly, half-working point-and-click website.
Let’s face it: many games have risen and fallen since Neopets that have tried to do the same thing and failed. Games with much more advanced graphics and algorithms, with more players, and with more options, but rarely with deeper lore and history than we have grown up with. Being part of the fabric of such an enduring and deeply loved site means something to us.
I’m so glad we are all still here. I’m thrilled to see people in the group getting access to their old accounts and realizing, much like me, that the dream of logging back in and finding yourself to be some sort of insane Neomillionaire because of some retired grapes and books you have stored away was just that—a dream. Over the next few months, as the planned resurgence plays out and Neopets continues fixing some of the long-broken parts of the site, we can expect to see actual new players coming on board. Will they be children or adults? Could this game still hold appeal for young people, or is the market for virtual pet economies restricted to those of us who can remember how to make a table in HTML and don’t care for our games to be 3D worlds you can walk about in?
I would LOVE to hear your deepest, most ridiculous memories of the site. The first time you logged on, that time you tried to explain the site to your dad or your best friend, that time you set up six accounts to spin the Wheel of Excitement and then got frozen. Share with me your most niche memories - here's mine:
Does anyone else remember theme parks?
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