Nine Years of Neopets

If you’ve used the Internet for a significant amount of time, especially in the early 2000’s, if you have a child or a young relative, there’s a good chance you’ve heard of it. Neopets is the virtual pet site that’s been up and running since November 1999.

As of September 14^th, 2010, I’ve been on the site for nine years.

...Rachel. You’re a college student. Why on earth are you playing that game…still?

The short answer is simply that it’s addicting. Is/was. I certainly don’t play it like I used to in elementary/middle school, when I easily blow hours at a time on the site. Nowadays, I couldn’t tell you last time I spent an entire hour in one day with it.

It is a virtual pet site yes, but it’s also a game arcade and a social medium as well. The site has over 180 million accounts today. It’s coming close to having one trillion page views. It’s fantastically popular. The creators were heavily involved, they had accounts of their own and were known to interact with regular users. Many, many "plots" have been spawned since it's inception, some as hunt-and-gather type of things where clues are spread out for you to unlock some secret. Others (my favorites actually), were actual wars where you got to pick a side and fight against baddies to see whose side could get more points. But the site's gone through some massive changes in the last few years. Not all I’ve particularly agreed with or even appreciated, but the general public claims it’s been for the better overall. I don’t keep up with the politics so much anymore, now that I’m in college and I have other stuff to keep myself busy. But I was very active in the day of the sale—when Viacom bought Neopets in 2005. This led to a plethora of changes and a huge spike in users as well as an eventual site-makeover.

One of the biggest changes involved a ton of redraws of pets and the ability to 'customize' them, or dress them with clothes and...stuff. The pets pictured overhead are called "Lupes." The first pet I ever made was a blue Lupe and originally looked like the top one.

I know I’ve taken a couple hiatuses, but somehow, I’ve managed to come back, and I’ve kept the same 2-3 accounts the whole time. (Those unfamiliar with the site, the Neopets Team…the rule makers, essentially, have said that one human being is allowed to have 5 accounts to accommodate all the Neopets you make or adopt.) My first account was made September 14^th, 2001, and my second about six months later. I use the second the most.

Originally, when I was still a little kid, I played the site daily. I made and adopted pets. I opened a shop and sold spare items, I explored far and wide, I played their arcade games so much that I made enough money to buy “paintbrushes” to change the color of my Neopets. When I painted all of the pets on my first account and had 300,000 Neopoints (their currency) I thought I was hot stuff. I might have been in 6^th grade by the time this occurred.

But then...I actually learned some stuff. In the first two years for sure, I taught myself HTML on the free “pet pages” each pet came with. I made up back-stories for my pets. I joined “guilds,” which were essentially just clubs of people, and in my first few years, it was essential to me to be a part of a worthy guild and to socialize with its members. When I turned 13 I played around with their chat boards, which were really more like forums. There, I learned about role-playing for the first time.

In a way, Neopets taught me a lot. So the long answer here is that I keep coming back to the site because I have a nostalgic spot for it. It’s taught me a lot about Internet politics, about business, about how people fuction, about websites, about storytelling. It gave me so much practice in writing and drawing that I’m grateful to have found the place. It is just a game, the pets are just pixels, but when you invest so much time into it all, it becomes more than that. It may just be a website that only exists in the invisible space that is the Internet, but it’s become something of an actual place to me. Of course it’s changed and I’ve not kept up with the news or the politics of it lately, but back in the day, it was like sliced bread. Not only could you play games and be imaginative, but you could meet (presumably) real people who liked it as much as you did.

Again, even though I’m pessimistic and old-fashioned and prefer the old site with its real sidebar (and not this top bar that I still don’t like the organization on), I’m glad its still around. It’s been a pretty great nine years, and I’m perfectly content to keep coming back, even if it’s only to play the arcade games between classes.

Now wait for it...old school ad time!