The History of Neopets
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- Опубликовано: 20 окт 2024
- The history of Neopets includes more Scientology, gambling, and internet-changing innovation that you probably realized.
Throwback is a series from Mental Floss where we take a deep dive into some of the most fascinating stories behind the toys, trends, and events you might remember from your childhood. This episode is all Neopets, the surprisingly influential Web 2.0 staple.
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This video brought back a lot of memories. Neopets was more than just feeding a pet; it was an entire virtual world. As someone who played Neopets religiously for years in the 2000s, even though most of the time spent was pretty unproductive, I did learn many life skills as a kid: HTML/CSS + photoshop (for my user lookup and pet pages), management (I helped managed guilds with thousands of members), economics (ok this is a bit of a stretch but buy low sell high came into play a lot), and surprisingly social skills (I’m still friends with a few of my Neopets friends to this today even after 17+ years). I really do miss the Neopets days, and wonder what it would be like today if it was still popular. Now it’s just all nostalgia.
This part!
If only the website worked. So much of it is Flash, so you can't even do much on most web browsers, which don't support it anymore. I was on there last year and was sad I could only play a few games that didn't use flash.
I joined Neopets 3 months ago.
Neopets was also one huge language learning site for us non-English speakers!👌
Ha, wow, didn't think about that angle-very interesting!
I learned how to speak in other languages because of neopets and gaia long before we could rely on any translation services.
I can spot someone who speaks English only as a second language from out of a crowd.
I work in website design and I learned nearly everything I needed to know about computers from Neopets and Myspace.
I’m about to turn 30, and I regularly CRAVE the feeling of playing neopets specifically in 1999. 😭
I'm 33 and have been on and off the site for years and participated in the reddit every time I've gone back 😆
It's so funny to me to think about all the adult themes of the site, now that I'm older. I started playing in 2002 when I was 7 or 8, and I played religiously for years. My entire childhood. In second grade, I was so obsessed with it, that my teacher banned us from even saying the word Neopets or talking about it. Lmao.
In all seriousness, I found Neopets while my parents were going through a terrible divorce and I had just moved to a new state. The immersive world was my escape. And I'm incredibly thankful for it.
Oh hey, I'm one of those people who started doing web development through neopets guild layouts and profiles who is now a professional web developer! I feel very seen right now 😂
I made graphics and HTML for all my guilds and now I work in digital marketing LOL
I want to make a new Neopets, with all the same reasons in mind. Want to help me?
I remember learning HTML at 13 so I could make my Neopet's webpage into a Hamtaro fan site. I remember that there was a bit of a scramble when the Neopets plushies hit store shelves. I waited outside of The Icing (Claire's but for slightly older girls) to see if I could get the one I wanted. I think my sister got an aisha doll. The Neopets team did a tour and my sister got one of the artists to draw her Neopet. My mom still has it around somewhere, it may be worth something.
I remember your hamtaro fan site 😭
But the SHOPS!!!! I'm shocked you didn't really even mention them! That was the #1 reason I got drawn in to coming back over and over again, and learning about marketing like supply and demand, or drawing people in with some lower priced products and hoping they'll stay and buy some higher priced products.
I liked the Kau 🐮. Also, the giant omelet and soup kitchen were cute features. Those games were very very addictive 😆.
Oh my goodness, Neopets shaped a good portion of my childhood. My first memory of the internet is playing a minigame on Neopets of one of the little dragon dudes. Kougra was my favourite. :)
Hey, I know you from the dA forums! I'm BOTOFan!
Kougras are pretty cool. If I didn't pick grarrl, maybe I would've gone with one of those.
Hi I’ve been playing Neopets since 2003. Don’t go back, don’t check on your pets. It’s depressing to look at the website in its current state, plus it’s having a current and active user data breach.
Also the community has been begging net dragon to not start a third NFT project after the first one failed (leaving the buyers with nothing) and the second NFT project was canceled after the team for it was repeatedly caught talking shit about the main Neopets user base.
This video is a great overview of the long term history but it really misses the major issues that have been going on for the last 3-4 years.
(Edited for grammar)
A JellyNeo regular, I presume? ^ -^
@@Apophis324 I check it more then I check on my pets at this point 😂
@@lilkingtrashbaby Yeeaahh, that is not surprising. If you want to insider's scoop on what is happening, it's the best source of information. I totally agree :)
Neopets used to be my obsession. I always did wish a animated movie could have been made.
I JUST checked on my Neopet for the first time in years yesterday and now this shows up on my feed haha
yall talking about playing as a kid and here I am still playing as an adult
And I just started.
I'd love to see a similar history of for RuneScape, or maybe in-game economies with a discussion on microtransactions. It was pretty wild learning economics to be able to merchant effectively back in the day from RuneScape and seeing just how inventive people can be with scams. The game still exists but after microtransactions it kind of ruined the naturalness of the economy.
The hack on Twitter earlier where celebs posted "send bitcoin I will double it" was a minecraft and runescape scammer. It was literally a gp doubling scheme
Ah man, Neopets. What a flashback. I played way, way, back in the day, I don't remember exactly when I started or stopped, But I think around 2000-2003. I know I was near the end of middle school when I started, and had lost interest somewhere in the middle of high school. Some of the stuff she talked about, specifically the brand integration wasn't really a thing yet. I bought some of the trading cards, (still have them in storage somewhere) that was around the time I had mostly stopped playing. A few years after I had stopped playing for good, I started coming across some toys in stores. I bought this blue Uni toy that made sounds for old times sake, because my first Neopet was a blue Uni named Tsunamii. I think had a couple others, I had a red and purple hippocampus type creature (I don't remember the species name) called Wetteron, and maybe a few others. Unfortunately, because my account was so old, and I was inactive for a very long time, my account was deleted. I have very fond memories of that game.
Neopets was my first big outlet through which I developed my voice acting-something I didn't know of at the time. I would often read aloud dialogue in the comics, games, animations, and banner ads, acting like I was the characters. This extended to my pets as well: a yellow korbat, two red usuls, and a blue techo.
OMG i was using Neopet like crazy as a kid. Made my first female friends simply because my "pet" looked cool (Shadow color), strong and knew the tricks to the site. Anyone else get some memories back?
The neopet plushies didn't take off because webkinz began in 2005 and for a long time was the neopets of the 2000s and into the 2010s. So webkinz took the spotlight away from neopets for a long time. But right now neopets are back and are in a new era. I'm a webkinz player and I just began playing neopets last night so I'm new still and so far its fun and boy is it harder then webkinz
Neopets also had trolls, before the word troll was coined. I remember them, for whatever reason being called "kirbys". I never got why.
I absolutely learned HTML/CSS on Neopets. People were sharing tutorial sites and it was the place to go to ask questions and find people to help debug any HTML code within Neopets and people's own personal websites.
I still love Neopets and log in every December for their advent calendar. Unfortunately the site hasn't been able to keep up with technology and is quite hard to run properly on most systems now. My (admittedly little) knowledge of html all came from playing Neopets. I also love using Neopets to gamble as I get the fun without having to bet real money (when I can get it to work).
Oh god I miss Neopets. I logged in earlier this year and it's like a zombified version of what used to be there, given that Flash is dead now.
“You’re probably not caring for a four-legged pet named Poogle,”
Me, who owns a Poogle: 😶
I can't believe anyone other than me remembers what NeoPets even was. I did have a lot of fun with the game, but certainly didn't think it played a large enough role in culture to be getting videos like this one made. Glad to see it though :)
I learned how to type much faster by chatting on neopets over one summer than I did in 2 mandatory semesters of typing “computer” classes in 6th grade.
I miss playing the games. The haunted mansion one was fun but I never finished it. I managed to snag a Chombie when there was a release at one point. My original accounts are gone, they were tied to a Comcast email. xP
Neopets was the temple/blueprint of other MMO games like Webkinz
I had a joint account with my best friend at the time and we had four pets (the max you could own) and cared for them for years. I go visit every few years for the nostalgia and mini games :)
I personally never understood how players customized their stores or found the stock market thing, so I guess I missed out on a lot of the educational stuff lol but I still had a lot of fun there.
i was super into neopets around the 2005-2006 mark for sure! My best friend and I would log in after school and chat on msn while playing 🤣
my favorite game on there was hannah and the pirate caves! (which i beat recently thanks to flashpoint)
Wow! Good memories. I learned how to do CSS and HTML on Neopets. Even met one of my best friends while playing Neopets. I still have my Neopets magazines and a few of the toys.🤣
Edited to say that I just logged in on my account for the first time in a long while.
The reason I became as proficient in English as I am today was in no small part due to neopets. I wad an active pet trader and the english boards were far more active and had far more pets than the spanish ones. It forced me to write in english in a way no other site or media could. Thanks neopets!
Neopets, and later Myspace, were directly responsible for me getting interested in graphic/web design, which is what my degree is in. I still go back and check on my Neopets every once in a while!
Pouring a hot cup of Borovan for Adam and Donna. Thanks for shaping my imagination for over 20 years.
I never played the game but I remember when Macca's had neopet toys in their happymesls, the toys where fully random and they're where so many and it was the coolest thing ever
I always logged in every year or so for nostalgia, but one time about 5 years ago, my account got frozen due to "suspicious activity" aka me getting the password wrong a single time. It took me months of harrassing their tech support before I could get back in. One of the things they asked me to confirm my ownership of the account was to list all the emails that had ever been attached to it... Ok buddy, let me just pull out my carefully documented list of all the stupid Hotmail addresses i cycled through since 2004 lmao. I got it back in the end though, and I think I'm due for another log in...
I emailed support last week after 20 years of being logged out and no idea the email associated. I got a response within 24 hours, a follow up email when I didn’t respond of all things and then access to the account within a few hours since my name is so tied to the account identity etc. I was amazed. Account was looted though :( but still very nostalgic.
Can confirm, without NeoPets I wouldn't have my current career.
i'm so happy the games are working again! meerca chase makes me so nostalgic.
Literally I always tell people I learned HTML from Neopets. 🤣
No better time for a Neopets video Then when they're currently still in the middle of an active data breach that they have not fixed over several weeks
Yeahhhh. Telling people to check on their Neopets feels kinda irresponsible right now, the breach has literally been in the news
I had friends that got into neopets hardcore. The mini plushies came with codes you could use on the site. The Neopeys currency was one of the first i saw buyable on "gift card" like credit cards in a few stores. And because of the many activities n mini games it banked on the addictive nature of folk and even fomo. Just crazy times, they were.
11:20 We had them as Happy Meal toys in Canada since Target didn't exist here. I got 3 different plushies and tried to use their official names but eventually I forgot what their official names were and I just named them something else
I didn't have internet so those Neopets plushies were all I really had in terms of Neopets. One was a frog creature, one was a dog, and one I'm not entirely sure what it was but I decided he was a mouse
Kinda jealous as in the UK the only way to get plushies was to buy them through the site, so would have also had to pay import tax as getting them from abroad (and they were already way above what I could afford).
I'm gonna guess... Quiggle, Lupe, and... maybe Blumaroo? I still have my coveted blue Ixi from that promotion, it was my favourite Neopet and I remember going to great lengths to get it
@@simonsaysism Had to look those up, Quiggle was definitely the frog. I just named him Froggy. The other two aren't the ones I had
@@ghost_curse ooo i thought I'd at least get 2. Gelert and Kacheek?
@@simonsaysism Gelert was the dog! I just named him Fluffy for...I actually don't remember why
Neopets is definitely what got me into HTML, CSS, and Photoshop.
I was in college when I first learned about NeoPets. I knew it was a big deal, but I had no idea
More Neopets content!
I still check my 20 year old account every couple days. The NFT projects have been total failures and they've done nothing but devalue Neopet's IP. No real Neopets fan that has stuck with the site all these years was in favor of this project. I'll probably be around to the bitter end, but I'll never spend money on the site again.
I had this weird desire to log back into my neopets after watching this... but the email I used for it is so old I don't have it anymore. 🤣🤣 We are talking like 15+yrs ago!
"Controversial religious society" is probably one if the nicest ways you could have described Scientology 😁
Don't try discussing it on the site though. Religion is a topic still not allowed by the filters :P
Oh man, I kind of miss my neopets. I don't think I'd be able to log in anymore, though, as I have a vague memory of being forced to update my password and no idea what I would have chosen. I remember when Paintbrushes could be bought for 10,000NP and I grabbed one from a friend for my very first painted pet. I remember being on Team Haunted Woods for the first Altador Cup tournament and winning a brush that way. I remember the early forums, and the times before faerieland fell.... I think I started playing back in 2001 or 2002? Aaah memories...
Fascinating!
Neopets, Geocities, LiveJournaly - yep I was on all of those. I still think LJ's model was the most healthy Social Media model. No algorithm, just reverse timeline of watched users, all of whom had robust and flexible friends group and moderation tools. Too bad it was bought by Vox.
Aww man. My childhood.
Neopets definitely taught me how to do basic coding.
Miss the good old days
90% of the entire site is unusable now since the death of Flash. I really hope they save it somehow it's completely broken and useless atm.
I still go on every day to do my dailies lol who else played in the altador cup this summer? 🙋🏽♀️
What a great video! Used to play everyday from 2005 to 2010. What a whole complex world that is, hope it could be great again like in the old days. My pets are now alive and well fed btw 🤣
I had 4 neopets but I have no idea of my username or password is. I remember a kougra but can't remember what the other 3 were. I'm 63 now and my daughter introduced me to Neopets when she was in grade school. She's 32 now. This brought back a lot of memories.
I still have 5 accounts that I occasionally go back and manage. I used to really get into stocking my shops, each account had specific items they sold, books, food, grooming supplies, toys, and weapons. Unfortunately, with the Super Shop Wizard, a search engine that will automatically sends the buyer to the cheapest items, playing the shop stock game became pointless. If you can't buy the items cheaply and sell them for a slight-to-mid markup, there's no point. These days when I go back I usually go around to the dailies and get free stuff to sell.
I sort of remember Neopets, but I never got involved with it back then, despite being a teenager at the time. I could've even had one of those nice profiles, as I taught myself HTML out of a book in 8th grade and was making basic websites on Angelfire and Geocities. I kinda want to check it out now...
i remember neopets.
my friends kept talking about it.
Will it work? WILL IT WORK? The NFTs were a scam! The first batch was bought up by bots and then their value plummeted. Now, whenever people associated with Neopets behind the scenes bring up another NFT campaign, the public comes with such a loud outcry that those ideas get shut down almost instantly... only to then later resurface again.
You also forgot to mention that since the Jumpstart takeover the site is still in disarray with things not working at all (especially since the Flash crash), working on a hybrid of old and new pages to just being plain boring.
Granted, they are trying (and in some cases succeeding) to keep Neopets alive and interesting. There must be some reason that I come back every day to feed my Neopets (which includes a Poogle, Erin >: | ). The recent security breach did not do them a lot of favours however, especially since it took them two weeks to actually resolve it. And then there's the numerous mobile games they've tried to launch over the years, with very limited access and success.
I just wish I could have started playing when the site first started.. Oh all those rare items I'd have....
I had forgotten that neopets was where I first learned code!
You’ve just unlocked a memory
Don't forget Xanga profiles and learning html to make custom backgrounds and what not. I think it was 1999 or 2000 I had my neopets account I had a tiger like pet. I will always remember spinning the daily wheel thing and winning the 10,000 points or whatever the largest amount was. I also remember winning lots of paintbrushes from that. I eventually painted my tiger thing with flames.
My poor neopet has been starving all this time
I wish I knew the login
NeoPets turned me into a pro BlackJack player.
Omg, I remember learning html in middle school to make my account page rock!
I am extremely disappointed that the Limited Too collab wasn't mentioned. I made my mom buy me basically everything because they all came with codes for random exclusive items. OG Amiibos.
I had no idea Neopets were still around after like 2004. I guess I quit after I made my first myspace account?
I don't have fond memories of Neopets. The community section was too restricted to allow for real communication. Like so many others I switched to Subeta, which I still play today.
Remember all the Neopets you left forever starving, but never dying.
My sister had a physical neopets thing, like a tamagotchi. We didn't have regular internet access at home until 2013? So we never got into the digital. Cool video tho
OMG I had a red eyrie named Prythian, and at one point my then-boyfriend bought me one of the t-shirts with *my* pet on it!
I had a blue shoyru named baby nables, and then eventually the korbat named salerno batty LOL the names, I shared an account with my friend who had a poogle, and my other friend had the monkey. i remeber adding music to my profile.
Guess I'm logging onto my old account when I get home... 23 years later...
I had a Neopets account back in about 2001. I had 3 pets. My friend and I even started our own guild. But then I somehow forgot/lost my password, and the hotmail account I had used to sign up had been deactivated due to lack of use, so I was never able to log in again. If anyone wants to check up on the pets belonging to Chimm86, and maybe feed them something, I'd be forever grateful.
I mean yeah! I was in the Asploding Adults guild. We were the best.
Neopets and GaiaOnline taught me html and basic economics
Haha I remember getting me and my cousin into trouble by making accounts on the highest age group and their parents finding out 😂 I think the chat function was locked on the lower ages... I remember finding the unicorn character interactive toy in a bargain shop and being so so happy to finally have a neopet toy as they weren't really available in the UK...I did make a new account to try play some of the old games earlier in the year but it is a husk of what it once was 😭 also being in a religious school but not believing myself I used to "pray" to the dark faerie Jhudora instead of God... Edgy 💀
Praying to Jhudora, oh my Fyora that made me laugh harder than it probably should have.
I was a neomillionaire, but not because I knew any of this was possible. Mainly got my neopoints by playing poker and blackjack all day... when I was 8.
I have a plushie of a yellow Aisha still on my bookshelf.
Learned html on those pet pages
We didnt' HAVE to play Oregon Trail in a computer class at school.
We GOT to play Oregon Trail in a computer class at school. =P
Karina from Drawfee is going to have some notes for you. Good ones, probably.
I always wanted a Jetzam!
Another warning side of my adhd that was overlooked
Jeez, I was so into this game during its heyday. It ruined one of my friendships though, because she hacked my account and took everything. A rather dumb way to lose a best friend, whatever way you look at it.
I’ve been saying for a while that the craze with guys playing the stock market and with cryptocurrencies is because they never played the neopets stock market when they were kids. It feels new to them
Why do I remember no advertising lmao
I had a little shoyru toy and I loved them so much I ended up getting them in three colours and I woudl play with thema nd my Bratz togther and my bratz had pet shoyrus, and then they hadmlittlest pet shop pets as pet pets... oh man... the good old days
I wouldn't even begin to be able to remember any login information associated with Neopets... besides which, the whole care-and-feeding aspect that other people apparently find addictive became annoying for me pretty quickly. Even today, all these games that want to have timed chore lists to increase engagement are irritating to me.
Damn I wonder if my accounts is still around. I can't even remember my username and password anymore. Pretty sure the email I used as kid is long gone too.
RIP Keyquest
Neopets is one of the reasons I learned html and css.
I still know my account numbers after almost 2 decades.
Sadly the current owners of Neopets have run it into the ground. They’ve much abandoned the site itself to focus on selling merch 🤦♀️
I'm so sad that Neopets became how it is last year T_T
I *still* have a neopets account…
This sounds metaverse but prehistoric
so basically Axies Infinity is neopets as NFTs
Collecting eggs from the snow/ice dragon
Gai online next please
Neopets were kinda like NFTs before they were a thing.