Not me! As soon as i thought I wouldnt play anymore i would go to the boards and find someone to adopt and care for my pets and give them a bunch of neopets to do it 😊 my babies will never go hungry!
As a little kid, I never realized how scummy the immersive advertising was. I just thought it was pretty dope that, if I were to live in this cool fantasy world with my Neopets, I'd still have access to McDonald's and Disney movies and stuff.
I guarantee Harley was being intentionally alarmist about the importance of feeding his Neopets to convince his mom to let him keep playing longer. Source: I did this.
What I expected: "Neopets made an unintentional weird design" "Neopets had a global shutdown because of this irl event" "An article about Neopets talks bad about it" What we got: "Scientology got it's hands on Neopets" "Black markets surrounding the trade of rare pets" "Hackers taking control over the website to obtain valuable virtual pets"
I remember watching a video a couple years ago just about how Scientology got involved with Neopets, I wish I remembered what it was called. It’s been my favorite random fact since but nobody ever believes me
When my older sister was like eight or nine (during the height of neopets, before kids had access to Internet easily) my dad’s april fools prank was to tell her that neopets was shut down because terrorists were using it to communicate and she told all her classmates that neopets didn’t exist anymore and kids were having full on meltdowns and crying
My brother got perma-banned from neopets when he was 8 (around 2003) for asking in the forums why they didn't have any jewish holiday-themed items to go with the christian holiday-themed items. He's still (understandably) salty about that one lmao
The mods were such shit on that site. Not sure how I didn't get banned - so many people got banned for pointless things like that. I remember they were using site monitors and support staff from an outside company, or something like that, and it was awful. But that was probably later than 2003. Maybe.
Nintendo of America was similar, religion wasn't allowed in US releases, yet holy water and crosses were allowed in Castlevania, and Kid Icarus was fine even though it's based entirely on Greek religion, yet games like Devil World never made because of biblical references.
no matter what you think of any of this, you’ve gotta admit that the neopets fandom comes up with some truly cool names for stuff. ‘savage saturday’ and ‘the day of sin’ sound like legit historical events
CALLING IT NOW the only thing that might put pause on this is the current "crypto winter" we're in (ironically, caused partially by the blowup of NFTs) but you know this was on their to-do list. it still might be, btw, before i knew the word "NFT", the first NFTs i ever came across were "crypto-kitties", which are exactly what they sound like. they reminded me a lot of neopets and i thought they were so cute. i had a lot of crypto and i love "virtual pet" things so i almost go one but i didnt...thank god. this was when they first launched, before i even understood what actually were (the word "NFT" wasnt even on the cryptokitties board, they just talked about using the blockchain to generate them) and how sinister and harmful they (NFTs) truly are.
I think its more of a 'bigger they are harder they fall' situation. Once things get big then you have to hire outside help, focus more on revenue to keep it afloat, etc and things get ugly quick. Not to mention it makes better clickbait to show something wholesome going awry
Unconverted pets are highly valued in the pet trading community and simply just adding a feature to turn one's pet into a UC would definitely cause controversy and will probably lead to a boycott or a mass quitting which wouldn't be very good for the site's already deteriorating fanbase.
@@lopiditty Nah, like any thing that happened in Neopets would be many people creating a fuzz for a week and things going back to normal, even the pet traders wouldn't be this mad because now they could focus on the true trophy good names, like doubt many traders are happy that their dream pet is stuck with a dumb name
@@lopiditty I mean. I quit when they did conversions in the first place. Two of my pets looked terrible converted so I just didn't bother, and it looked like they where really pushing to make that the next big thing for the site, so I lost interest. If they bring back the more expressive and unique aspects of their designs, I think a lot of people might be interested in returning
@@meaninglez100 I guess so, I'm only really going off my experiences with situations like this tbh. And if its any comfort I've heard that they are thinking about bringing UCs back in the form of "skins"...
I don't particularly see why they can't just implement a feature to 'unconvert' pets, but use new/different artwork from the OG UCs. That way people can unconvert their pets if wanted, and the people who have invested years toward obtaining a UC won't feel so much like they wasted their time and effort.
I used to trade my neopets McDonalds toys IRL and scammed my friends into letting me borrow theirs for a week the week i was moving to another state... i actually still have them...
I'm not surprised my Scientologist cousin was pretty obsessed with neopets, so this made it come full circle. It might have just been because her parents saw it as "safe"
as someone who had never had an account on neopets, seeing "scientology" in a video about the controversies of basically the first virtual pet forum almost made me question if this was the right video
my least favorite neopets controversy was when my older cousin told me he made a neopet named geodude before pokemon red and blue came out and I totally believed him
this comment dug a memory out of my brain omg when i was seven or eight i had a guild called 4trees or something like that where the only members were me and my six other accounts and i just roleplayed warrior cats with myself bc i was scared to talk to strangers LMAO
I remember my entire elementary having those McDonald’s plushies. I had the cat with the neck floof (can’t remember the name) And we’d all role play at recess. Then one day It fell out of my pocket when I was walking home. Needless to say I was crushed. Luckily I ended up finding it on the path to school. But there was some bad news…..a dog got to it and tore its back open. Then my loving mother stitched it back together 😊bless her heart
I remember being perpetually disappointed because I wanted some of the nifty colors, but even basic paintbrushes were SO expensive that (when they were actually available for sale) it was just depressing to look at them.
Same thing for me. I could never come close to affording a paintbrush, but I did win a baby one from the Wheel of Excitment. I was 13 or 14, and I was so elated, it was like I had won $10,000 on a game show lol 😝
I officially left Neopets when they added a premium currency that cost real-world money. I felt lied to and betrayed because I had seen an early Q&A with TNT in which they said that Neopets would NEVER have any features that cost real-world money. I specifically remember that word “never”. I was surprised that nobody seemed to talk about that.
Well it must've cost them a fortune to run the site and wanting a free to play game without microtransactions is entitled gamer behaviour at its finest.
@@weevil8025 buying a kids website to make money off children is pretty clearly the point of having bought neopets. I don't think it's especially entitled to say "don't exploit children"
@@weevil8025 Can I ask what I twisted? I agree running a site is expensive, and I understand asking for money. Making things loot-cratey on a site that goes for kids is what I object to Also as far as I understand corporate buyouts, they don't happen unless the new company thinks they can wring money out of the thing they are buying.
Sometimes when I watch your videos I wonder if you're either much older than me or much younger than me but we're very online when you were very young. I remember feeding my neopets and my middle school library lol. I'm 30
This made me remember how I scammed someone in my guild into giving me their lab ray map pieces. Also I had a neofriend who convinced me she was Emma Watson. Neopets was a lawless place.
Can I just say how funny it is that “UC” is being used to refer to rare vintage neopets 😭 I go to UC Berkeley but now my brain reads it as “unconverted Berkeley”
I hang around in the Art RolePlay Game community and UC often is used to mean 'uncommon' (as in the rarity tier of something). So hearing everyone going nuts over that acronym was certainly something.
This gave me flashbacks of 7-8 year old me trying to understand the stock market, failing miserably and logging everyday for the free omelette so my neopets wouldn’t die of hunger, I was a very poor but loving parent
Can we appreciate how pretty Izzzy looks like in all these videos? It looks like they put in a lot of work to their makeup alone in each video, nevermind all the effort in these vids
Honestly, losing badly at gambling in a video game as a kid would have taught me a lot about gambling. Mostly how it's just not worth it. I remember games with minigames that were just gambling and a way of bolstering your currency. I would avoid them because I knew I'd lose.
same, as a kid I remember considering the neopets gambling a thing that I'd most likely lose money at, and would avoid it, would only play it very occasionally if I wanted to, but I'd go prepared to lose some money
I mean kinda? I don't think gambling really is whether you "win" or "lose", but moreso the suspense of "what if" that gets people addicted. It all really depends if you're predisposed to that kind of high and if you have trouble controlling yourself, which I think kids probably do have trouble with the latter. Granted I'm not a psychologist in any way, shape, or form, but I can kind of understand their reasoning for locking it for 13+
Earlier controversies: Oh no they're shoving advertisements down the kids' throats and letting them do virtual gambling Later controversies: Art changed, let's illegally get pets with the old art because it's rare
Even earlier controversies: "You can't say firetruck specifically as one word in the forums because it begins with f and ends in uck." Also, "HOW DARE THIS FLASH VIDEO SAY, 'I'll see you in Hell!' YOU CAN'T SAY HELL IT IS A SWEAR!!!"
I agree the advertising was a lot. Even as a kid, I was like “this is ridiculous” because it got to the point that almost EVERY GAME was an ad and there were items for sale that were ads.
Agreed. I remember one game specifically that was literally just watching an ad and then getting neopoints from it. They really did the most with advertising lol
it is crazy and also very depressing how at the time ads that pervasive were considered "a lot" and advertising to kids was instinctively considered shitty by most, and now that is literally standard practice and kids watch 20+ minute long ads by choice because thats the majority of age-appropriate online content available
The only "controversy" I remember is when an Avent calendar day was bugged and it keep giving points so of course I got enough to buy a lab back in the day that December
OMFG DAT incident! I remember it, it kills me! Me and my older brother played the game at the time, maybe 9--10 years old, and when he realized the bug, he placed a weighted thingy on his spacebar and the mouse on the button and left it clicking like 24hrs! Dude made millions, bought a rare brush, painted his Lupe and hours later got his account iced lol He didn't care cuz he felt acomplished and was done with the site, BUT they also froze MY account, thinking it was a second of his since we always sent each other stuff cuz brothers duh. I am still salty about that 😂 I tried to fight the freeze but didn't get any reply and gave up; thanks for the trust issues neopets, learned that coporate doesn't care 👌
My grandma used to play neopets daily and was one of the richest people on the site from stock trading and then someone hacked her account and stole all her neopoints :(
My neopets account was frozen when I was 14 because I had stumbled upon some fake items in the money tree and sold them without realizing they were fake. Basically I just wasn't a super knowledgable neopets user and didnt use the forums so while I loved Neopets and used it daily, I had genuinely no idea that fake items were possible at all, I didn't even realize the items I was grabbing were rare or expensive, I just grabbed them because they looked strange. They were Thyoras Tear, which has a black background in the preview image rather than white. Apparently they're very sought after battle items (I never used the arena so I didn't know about it lmao). As of right now they're worth 33 MILLION neopoints, but back in the day I think they were actually worth a lot more than that. I grabbed at least 2 or 3, and when I saw the prices, I just figured it was the act of a very kind and generous user and I had a stroke of luck, but I was devastated when my account was frozen not long after selling. I know a part of it was my fault for being out of the loop, but it still felt so unfair. I just remember thinking about how, I was a teen, even though I had this account for a long time and would miss it dearly for the nostalgia, yeah I'd survive lol, but damn, imagine the LITTLE KIDS on the site who fell for that sort of thing getting their entire accounts frozen, and being blamed for the actions of adults using exploits that SHOULDN'T EVEN BE POSSIBLE, if the game designers just had a safer and better built website. It's just a lot of unnecessary fear and grief that should IMO have a better resolution than 'if you dont want to get in trouble for something you didnt even do, then don't get tricked in the first place kids!!' :///
Me too! Did you RP on the boards or post your writing? That was a major part of my time on the site lol 😝 In case you’re wondering, writing on Neopets was on a number of different topics, but most of what I gravitated towards was fanfiction for books (Harry Potter) but RPing was the main writing activity that I experienced on Neopets. For you young’uns, RP, “role playing”, collaborative story writing with your own or famous characters. Your friend would post a piece of the story from their character’s perspective and then you would post a piece of the story from your character’s perspective, etc. Could be done with multiple people. RPing ranged from books, shows, movies, comics, manga/anime, Neopets-related, etc. My writing got a huge shot-in-the-arm from my RPing, not to mention my editing/proof-reading skills, and I discovered my fictional prose/writing style. Since then, I’ve been published a few times and now I’m working on my first novel. Pardon this ol’ geezer Millennial’s ranting 😜
Paintbrushes were the virtual equivalent of gold to me as a youngster. I remember checking the "secret" shops in the fairy village but never actually having enough NeoPoints to buy anything cool... Also, there was a battle arena for NeoPets where I always got my pets asses kicked, which made me a sad child. Good times.
My late wife learned HTML and coding as a kid from Neopets, as bad as it was in some regards, it was such an amazing way to help kids express their creativity. She also had a tattoo of our favorite beta Neopet, Scrunt🧡
Of all the controversy it's important to comoare to today - when gamifying gambling in childrens games and toys is super common and happens with Real money now - microtransactions, blind boxes etc.
Gambling in Fable 2 got me into so much debt I eventually realised I couldn’t gamble my way out of that I think it taught me a positive lesson about gambling tbh.
I got an incredibly good laugh at The Jungle_Boo part...like, what is it with companies and being unable to admit they were telling false stories when caught by their users? Continuing to lie or to try to save face with shenanigans just makes everything a lot worse, and it's pretty insulting to the intelligence of a service's users.
I created the original “nerd” named pet. Was astounded it was available so took that in a second. My account had well named, painted pets with neocash clothes, completed lab ray, and millions of neopoints before it was hacked and everything was gone. I’m still mad about it tbh.
I remember being under 13 when i signed up and much of the site - including the chats - were off limits without parent permission. No lie: i had to print off a permission slip and get my mum to sign and mail it! Could you imagine????
It's true that Neopets can easily convert pets back into UC. In early 2019 my long-term account had 3 UCs stolen, one was zapped by the lab ray into a converted kougra. I had enough proof for 2 of the UCs that I had owned them since I created them, so they returned them and reverted them back into UC for me. The 3rd was unfortunately lost, and through some digging, I found that it had been consistently passed around the pound chat and I was told it had gone through "too many users" to be easily given back and there was nothing they could do. Conveniently that same day the account that had it was frozen..it was all very strange but opened my eyes to how aggressively people were trying to get the accounts of inactive players.
I actually adopted an acara with the new artstyle but in 2014 the the vandagure was introduced, they also changed the acara and her profile pic is the v5 acara (currently we have the v6 acara)
I used my first paycheck on a virtual pet ten years ago - I bought a UC Plushie Bori for $450 when I was 16. I went and bragged on the trading forums, and then my 5 accounts and all of my sister's accounts were deactivated. Love that for myself.
Fun fact: Another 'controversy' took place in the mid 00s when a young girl named Lisa Fu self-published a book full of stolen stories from the Neopian Times
To be honest I'd love the option for us to change our neopets back to their older art. Just make a whole new line of "Retro Paintbrushes" for each older type and make them either super rare to find or a reward for competition. Granted the art style would change but it just means their neopet is either really old or they were lucky since to avoid making the "Retro Paintbrushes" scammable; you would be unable to trade them and have a 30 day timer after use (to avoid swapping like mad). So imagine "Retro Paintbrushes" like: "Retro Red Paintbrushes", "Retro 1st Draft Paintbrushes" or "Retro Royal Paintbrushes" and in some cases Brucie would be a Penguin parodying Bruce Forsyth again; but still a penguin, just wearing similar clothes and face. I guarentee people would come back, new and old to try to get these old designs.
People have talked about this for a long time - making a "Deconversion Ray" item or something that was bought only with real-life money could bring in so much profit for the site, but some people feel it would cheapen existing UCs.
@@funnybell454 One way could be that those who had a UC before the "retro Painbrush" came out, would get a unique special neopets badge on their pet; to signify its value. But not just any badge. A badge that will have the Neopets logo on a golden emblem with red ribbon; one for the pet, one for the account holder. That way original UC's are easier to spot, they are more valuable and even if they give away their pet; they'll still have that special badge on their own profile :D
@@kateb6699 Possibly. Although that idea is so good I'd make it an April 1st reward (for the whole of april though). Where if you use the retro paintbrush then, you'll get the photo penguin bruce in a suit :D
omg, seeing those McDonald’s toys brings back a memory. I was OBSESSED with those. & when they were in-store, my aunt worked at a McDonalds. I remember asking her if she could get me some / take the display home after they were done with the promotion. She totally got to come home with the display, & I ended up having SOOOO many of them. I dunno if I still have them somewhere, I may have decided that I was too old for them or something. But it was so cash money.
The whole gambling controversy is so funny to me because when I was little, my aunt gave me her Mario 64 game for the DS. The gambling part of the game was my favorite thing to do. And no one bat an eye when I showed them I was learning how to play blackjack from Luigi 😂
That game was the reason I learned how to play poker! Knowing how to play poker helped me learn how to play other games like Five Crowns and Mahjong. I've bought lottery tickets ONCE when I became of age (18) but I still can't legally gamble until later this year (21). Even then I still have no interest in real life gambling. (Unless my family is playing a card game or Mahjong for money, but I don't think that's quite the same.)
Which Easter year was this? I was very young when I started playing Neopets and honestly never witnessed so many cool things that happened over the years of Neopets being online.
I'm not sure if Neopets saved me by letting me know at a young age that I'm easily addicted to gambling or if it created my gambling compulsion as a whole...
I'm going to age myself by saying that I remember being an early "rich" Neopets player back when it was near impossible to save 1000 neopoints and own a single golden negg. My pride and joy at the time was my store full of rare, high-priced neggs... seems sad now, lol
I was an avid user when the market priced rare plushies in the hundreds of thousands.... I logged back on recently to see my plushie gallery previously worth millions now worth less than 20k. 😑🤌🏻
The best part is that even without the UC pet drama, the black market would still exist. There is 2 forms of currency on Neopets: the free neopoints, and the (paid for with real money, excluding a few situations) neocash. The way neocash items are sold is straight-up awful- there are a couple items that stay consistent (such as basic wigs and clothing), but the majority of items are only available for a short period of time and when they're gone, there's no legal way to get them outside of trading since they cannot be bought and sold in a regular market. What this means is that if you want, say, an Aisha dress sold for neocash in 2014, you either have to already have a neocash item that's equally as valuable (which is nearly impossible for new players), or... you can just buy it off the black market for $1-$25 dollars. Needless to say, most players willing to use the black market choose the latter. This could of course be fixed by having a regular resale market for neocash items, but this is Neopets- of course there isn't.
all I learned about stocks on neopets is to never invest on them, just save your money on the bank to become a diamond plus client or whatever it was called. this video brought back memories I didn't know I had
What I learned from having a shop was, it'll be cute for a minute and then someone will steal your account and take everything from your shop and leave you with nothing. Survive on the bare minimum yourself, and nobody can steal your ish.
Yeah I learned that I should never use real life scratch cards because I get sucked in and overspend on them, which I suppose I was lucky in that it helped me learn that about myself versus kickstart a real-world scratchie addiction lmao
This is the effect Fable 2’s gambling had on me as a child. I spent hours trying to win my money back, hoping to just hit the jackpot or whatever, yet I just wound up more and more in debt. Occasionally a win gave me hope, but ultimately I could never get back to where I could break even again. Eventually I gave up, got arrested, and had to do community service. So I learned some things about myself and about gambling. I learned that it was just a waste of time and money, and there are better ways to make cash.
@F Karma is there any "being good at gambling"? isnt the whole point is that chance plays at least a large role in whether you win? i dont gamble and ive always kinda wondered this lol
@@willyeeton4390 well, yeah, it didn’t teach me to be ethical just not to be a gambling addict lol. Also, I probably earned a significant percentage of my money working as a blacksmith for ages. Time and effort into perfecting a skill I spent time and effort working on until I was wealthy enough to exploit the other hard workers. Yay, capitalism.
This video helped me remember the name of Petz Dogs 2, a childhood favorite video game that I couldn't remember the name of for YEARS. THIS HAS LITERALLY BOTHERED ME FOR YEARS. (I recognized the music from the game and saw the music sited in the description)
Marapets was downright racist and offensive, full well knowing it and not giving a damn. Neopets is simply making a few mistakes here and there that get them in far more trouble that it's worth, but they do do their best to actively fix said issues.
@@inkling457 I do honestly think that Marapets is so much worse. My comment was only about the subtitle of "SCIENTOLOGY AND SHADY ADVERTISING". It admittedly caught me off guard. Still, Mara is so much more problematic for the reasons mentioned.
@@lionkid5841 Izzyzzz has a video on it. Basically Marapets had a bunch of racist and fat phobic content on their site and when they were called out, the owner of the site decided to throw a hissyfit on Twitter. Also they didn't pay their site artists. So uh, not great.
oh man. this reminds me SO much of animal jam, from the selling items to unavailable items being super rare. even accidentally trading for hacked items and getting banned. this kind of makes me want to make an animal jam version of this format.
I love how you can tell how users tried to swerve the filtering system in the early days, just because of the amount of variations of the word “cake” that are banned lol
The funny thing about the gambling games on the site is that they definitely made me LESS likely to gamble as an adult. After wagering my virtual money and making no profit, I went "Wow, gambling really is a waste of time, huh?"
Apparently I lost interest before they went with sponsored stuff from McDonald's and Coca-Cola in-game, because I have no memory of that whatsoever. I do remember sneaking up to take chunks out of a giant omelet randomly lying on the ground, various colored snowballs and cannons as weapons/items, and the fact that there was always a Skeith named "turdmuncher" in the pound.
I remember looking at Neopets when I was young and I was so confused by it, I wasn't able to understand its website or how it exactly worked so I pretty much missed out on the Neopets childhood nostalgia train. Talk about absolutely wild with how much I missed out on and knew absolutely zero about.
I remember playing a game on there abt a blue dragon fighting his way through a dungeon and that was abt it. I loved petpet park though but I never got involved in neopets bc it didnt feel as interactive
Me too, I wasn't around for most of these virtual worlds since I was basically only on the internet to look up pictures of animals or pokemon that I could 'save' by tracing them on paper (since we only had 1 computer for the whole family) or play browser-game after browser-game on sites like Zylom when I was a kid. I felt a bit intimidated by the internet back then and only stuck around on the sites my parents introduced me to for the longest time. I only got interested in these types of games in recent years, having been one of those saddened to hear about Fer.al's shutdown and nowaways mostly spend my time on Flight Rising.
Poptropica was really bad about targeting immersive ads. I don't really remember the ads on neopets, but damn I remember the collabs and stuff on poptropica and how weird that made me feel
Same, there was so many! My sister and I would tag-team on poptropica, and we usually avoided islands branded with like diary of a wimpy kid, or big nate, or whatever else. But those damn advertisement screens you had to run past to get to the next area? Annoyed the fuck outta me. Just let me go to the next place!
I used to love Poptropica. My sister and I were obsessed with the cryptid island. Amazing how little I noticed all these ads, I wasn't that young when I frequented Neopets and Poptropica.
If anything the fact that we didn’t pay much attention to the Neopets ads is worse though. Like, they were way better at planting brands in your head without it raising your BS radar.
I laughed so hard when I heard that a mother was outraged because her kid was playing virtual poker to feed their virtual pet because I never realized that that’s exactly what I was doing. Wild times. Well tbh not so much to feed them as paint them. But hey I got my Royal Shoryu eventually so
Growing up i was really into Animaljam but i remember how quickly things fell apart with rare beta items becoming so popular and in demand, along with so many of the rumors and bullcrap that happened. some examples being: Animaljam/Wildworks will turn an blind eye to pedophilia, racism, and other offenses as long as you're known in the community (example being Hyenine1, you can find his drama everywhere) hackers.. oh looooord the hackers (Fman, any AJ player would remember him) Exploiters (such as the magenta item glitches, or fake headdress trades that would ban both accounts) also the fact that the players can and will throw a baby to get their dream items.
@Spare Bun oh my its a large can of worms.. its not my place to go around saying it... but what I know is the allegations is he groomed an underaged girl and then when she came forward about it Chocolate4froggy told her to stop being a drama queen. hes also drawn pretty gnarly things such as sexualizing vore, the confederate flag.. stuff like that- against all odds Animaljam has kinda ignored it...? as I said this is my basic knowledge on the matter but you can honestly look it up anywhere and find the tea
For context, I'm 26 now. I started Neopets when I was around 6 or 7, and I remember finding/being on the message boards when I was about 11 or 12. There were likely so many predators there - I remember people forming online relationships, myself included! I also remember when you could create a new, blank page to link on your profile where you could format the page with your own pictures, text, etc. I was learning to code at 12 🤣 I miss those days.
Oh my god, same here! On everything you said, even to the age 😂 I remember making drawings of my pets and creating a full on mary sue lore and learning html tables to make the page all fancy
you should make a video about toontown online :) the rise and fall, popular toontown youtubers, toontown rewritten and other servers drama and the fated toontown rewritten app!!!! I can help you with info since I have played toontown since 2003 :) hmu!!!
Ah!!! There’s so much to talk about!!!! Do you remember the little letters and cards they would send out every month ? I really hope they do a vid on this because my nostalgic heart would absolutely burst
Now that flash player is out, the site is literally DOOMED. No neohomes or arcade games, and a lot of the wheels no longer work bc flash is required. Neopets is fucked now... Unless you like to collect for galleries there, tbh.
yeah i took a look at neopets a little while ago and there were like 4 games left or something like that. it's a super watered down version of what i played as a kid.
The site seems buggy too. I popped in a couple weeks ago because I was feeling like playing and stockpiling neopoints again, but the remaining games are abysmally low in quantity and for some reason I had a hard time actually submitting my score, it kept bugging out. It was sad to see so few games left! They've known about the Flash collapse for years now, I have to assume this is down to mismanagement or lack of budget...or both.
They shot themsleves in the foot getting rid of key quest, habitarium etc in the first place, and then not being prepared for flash to go on top of that...? really donked it :/
I don't remember being uncomfortable with the ads, I just thought the sponsored items were tacky and undesirable, as well as the games being generally worse.
Yeah I feel like a lot of people including myself naturally avoided them. Like, ew, why are you invaldjng my perfect and cute escape from reality reality with the ugliest parts of reality reality? Gross
Ah neopets, the first place where I encountered creeps online at the age of 10. Seriously, no one warned me about the creeps online, I just wanted my cat creature to have a blue cloud coat.
Y’all KNOW that during the ‘day of sin’ that it was most likely children doing a lot of the cussing lmfao- I mean- children are chaotic. Those posts were acting like it was JUST adults cussing on those forums when there were probably children in the middle of that chaos too lol
this is insane. im so glad we all remember Neopets. i specifically remember one girl named snoopy who was like *the* best with making guild layouts and had THE COOLEST painted pets.
this is your reminder to go feed your Neopets it’s been ten years and they’re dying
No I will not 😎
Fred FiggleHorn
Not me! As soon as i thought I wouldnt play anymore i would go to the boards and find someone to adopt and care for my pets and give them a bunch of neopets to do it 😊 my babies will never go hungry!
good
My Tamagotchi died at least 12 years ago from *Starvation.* :c
i dont know why but "he doesn't even know what a virtual soup kitchen is!" is the funniest thing i've heard all day
same 😂
Same
well neither does the lady. This is soup kitchen fairy slander
I just kep thinkinh "what a dumb 9 year old" bc I used to play when I was at that age and almost always fed my neopets there 😅
You're laughing. He doesn't even know what a virtual soup kitchen is, and you're laughing.
One of my best friends from highschool met her fiance on Neopets. He moved across the country for her and everything.
that's beautiful
Love wins
Amazing
Aww, I love that. My wife and I have a similar story but, we met on Webkinz
So is your friend a he or a she? Two different pronouns being used
As a little kid, I never realized how scummy the immersive advertising was. I just thought it was pretty dope that, if I were to live in this cool fantasy world with my Neopets, I'd still have access to McDonald's and Disney movies and stuff.
I don't even remember any advertising.
I honestly dont remember it, maybe it wasnt a thing in my country?
Lol same!! Which I supposed meant it was doing it's job 🤔 How do you feel about it now that you're older?
@@that.neurodivergent I mean I guess I consider it pretty scummy, but at this rate, it's also depressingly expected.
@@CJCroen1393 true :(
I guarantee Harley was being intentionally alarmist about the importance of feeding his Neopets to convince his mom to let him keep playing longer. Source: I did this.
Bro.. I remember my parents grounded me and I almost had a panic attack about feeding my pets 💀💀
Imagine going to a cassino and thinking "be cool, it's just like neopets, right?"
This comment made me shed a tear from laughter, thank you so much this made my fuckin WEEK
I actually kicked somebody's ass in blackjack using techniques I learned playing on Gaia Online. XD
I have though these exact thoughts.
Neopets is literally how I learned to play Bullshit, which remains my favourite card game. It never made me want to actually gamble though.
Love black pink blink 4 life
I expected the controversies to be like “they didn’t pay this worker!” Or “this neopet is weird!” But then I saw Scientology and was just like 🤨🤨⁉️
i just want an ep of *The Aftermath* that features Neopets. and see the devil known as Miscavige hugging a Skeith or something
Xenu has its tentacles everywhere 😔😅
Literally haha, right out of the gate I was like OH OKAY THAT KIND OF CONTROVERSY
What I expected: "Neopets made an unintentional weird design" "Neopets had a global shutdown because of this irl event" "An article about Neopets talks bad about it"
What we got: "Scientology got it's hands on Neopets" "Black markets surrounding the trade of rare pets" "Hackers taking control over the website to obtain valuable virtual pets"
I remember watching a video a couple years ago just about how Scientology got involved with Neopets, I wish I remembered what it was called. It’s been my favorite random fact since but nobody ever believes me
"It's crazy how far people will go just for a pet with slightly different art" -Me, a pokemon fan, Sweating
Lol
not me spending a week straight resetting the game trying to get shiny reshiram 😭
i got him though it was worth it
@@daydreams6956 👏👏👏 I applauded your persistence.
@@daydreams6956 man good job. Ive been trying to breed a shiny mudkip for about a year now. Still haven't gotten it 🥲
Wow, this bulbasaur is a slightly different tint of green!
When my older sister was like eight or nine (during the height of neopets, before kids had access to Internet easily) my dad’s april fools prank was to tell her that neopets was shut down because terrorists were using it to communicate and she told all her classmates that neopets didn’t exist anymore and kids were having full on meltdowns and crying
Did her dad want her to tell her classmates?
why would he say that 😭😭😭
@@sharonious666 we do a little trollin
That must have been a fun call home.
My first internet girlfriend was on Neopets, I would've been crushed.
My brother got perma-banned from neopets when he was 8 (around 2003) for asking in the forums why they didn't have any jewish holiday-themed items to go with the christian holiday-themed items. He's still (understandably) salty about that one lmao
f
Fucking O O F
And he was damn right
The mods were such shit on that site. Not sure how I didn't get banned - so many people got banned for pointless things like that. I remember they were using site monitors and support staff from an outside company, or something like that, and it was awful. But that was probably later than 2003. Maybe.
Nintendo of America was similar, religion wasn't allowed in US releases, yet holy water and crosses were allowed in Castlevania, and Kid Icarus was fine even though it's based entirely on Greek religion, yet games like Devil World never made because of biblical references.
no matter what you think of any of this, you’ve gotta admit that the neopets fandom comes up with some truly cool names for stuff. ‘savage saturday’ and ‘the day of sin’ sound like legit historical events
don’t forget the creativity of “tamponslut”
@@R34G4N that is truly great creativity
Savage Saturday sounds more like a wrestling thing tbh lol
Yeah
Yeah
“hopefully they’ll find a way to avoid the decades of drama that plagued the website”
5 months later: “so neopets is selling NFTs”
WAIT WHAT
@@heavenlydusk she made another video about it a few months later lol
CALLING IT NOW
the only thing that might put pause on this is the current "crypto winter" we're in (ironically, caused partially by the blowup of NFTs) but you know this was on their to-do list. it still might be,
btw, before i knew the word "NFT", the first NFTs i ever came across were "crypto-kitties", which are exactly what they sound like. they reminded me a lot of neopets and i thought they were so cute. i had a lot of crypto and i love "virtual pet" things so i almost go one but i didnt...thank god.
this was when they first launched, before i even understood what actually were (the word "NFT" wasnt even on the cryptokitties board, they just talked about using the blockchain to generate them) and how sinister and harmful they (NFTs) truly are.
Everyone has NFTs! Nickelodeon has NFTs!
@@lethaldream50crypto kitten
Did they really expect the fanbase to believe them when they basically said "We can't change a JPG"
It's much more complicated than that. They had to change a PNG. Huge difference. Basically their hands were completed tied
@@brasteryakintosh9418 Oh, god, that's understandable. I once tried to change a PNG, and.. while I did manage to do it, the experience scarred me.
@@GumSkyloard you wouldnt download a car
you wouldnt right click an nft
you wouldnt edit a png
smh
@@brasteryakintosh9418 i can confirm this. i once tried changing it and i blew up the whole andromeda galaxy
@@brasteryakintosh9418 Is this satire or not
i always find it funny how the most ‘wholesome’ looking franchises manage to attract loads of drama
Yup, like how PETA came after Animal Crossing for no reason.
@@willowfive8330 peta has literally never been wholesome
I think its more of a 'bigger they are harder they fall' situation. Once things get big then you have to hire outside help, focus more on revenue to keep it afloat, etc and things get ugly quick. Not to mention it makes better clickbait to show something wholesome going awry
Lisa Frank controversy is wild
Animal jam. That’s it that’s the comment
the idea of a kid having to gamble just to feed his children is so funny to me
He feeds his children with alcohol
@@varula2322 that sounds unhealthy and most likely taste disgusting
@@raulphilipgoco403 Wait what did i say that comment was old and not visible to me
@@varula2322 “He feeds his children alcohol”
@@varula2322 lmao nice
i would like to thank the youtube algorithm for this GIFT
Holy shit worlds collide
Omg RIGHT?! Who is this and what is happening how am I 20 mins in?!?
Right? Bless this content
Same
I always look for comments like this one because i was sent this video from the algorithm too lol
The audio of Izzy saying "Big brain small peepee. Or none at all. Stonks" so solemnly in her accent is so fucking funny and adorable
Where
@@Man_Aslume25:32
@@carla2kool4schuul thanks
I seriously don't buy the "can't convert back" thing when it's literally just a jpg you can overlay whenever/wherever you want
Unconverted pets are highly valued in the pet trading community and simply just adding a feature to turn one's pet into a UC would definitely cause controversy and will probably lead to a boycott or a mass quitting which wouldn't be very good for the site's already deteriorating fanbase.
@@lopiditty Nah, like any thing that happened in Neopets would be many people creating a fuzz for a week and things going back to normal, even the pet traders wouldn't be this mad because now they could focus on the true trophy good names, like doubt many traders are happy that their dream pet is stuck with a dumb name
@@lopiditty I mean. I quit when they did conversions in the first place. Two of my pets looked terrible converted so I just didn't bother, and it looked like they where really pushing to make that the next big thing for the site, so I lost interest. If they bring back the more expressive and unique aspects of their designs, I think a lot of people might be interested in returning
@@meaninglez100 I guess so, I'm only really going off my experiences with situations like this tbh. And if its any comfort I've heard that they are thinking about bringing UCs back in the form of "skins"...
I don't particularly see why they can't just implement a feature to 'unconvert' pets, but use new/different artwork from the OG UCs. That way people can unconvert their pets if wanted, and the people who have invested years toward obtaining a UC won't feel so much like they wasted their time and effort.
knowing this is where so many of y'all spent your formative years explains a lot about the internet today
Yea.....Well... i MADE THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS SELLING UC-Pets❗
I used to trade my neopets McDonalds toys IRL and scammed my friends into letting me borrow theirs for a week the week i was moving to another state... i actually still have them...
@@Aj01110 wow that’s fucked up
I abandoned my neopets for habbo hotel
@@Number1FanProductions I was on my 8 year old grind 😩 gotta do what you gotta do in these streets.
"i remember neopets! how many controversies could they possibly have?"
runtime: 47 minutes
chapter 1: scientology
😱🤣🤣🤣 i am so excited
And she forgot about Dupe Day. That could have been another 10 minutes.
Literally my thoughts lol!!!!
What is scientology
@@aliflim649 a cult, a very controversial one at that. I believe they are trying to gain legitimacy as a religion.
@@aliflim649 the truth
Clicking on a neopets related video and encountering the word "Scientology" felt like a baseball bat to the throat. 10/10 Would recommend
As a Club Penguin kid, Scientology being on CHAPTER *1* caused me major whiplash.
I'm not surprised my Scientologist cousin was pretty obsessed with neopets, so this made it come full circle. It might have just been because her parents saw it as "safe"
Really? A bat to the throat sounds painful, I can’t see why anyone would recommend it
What felt that way for me was the "for legal reasons" because yeah
What's Scientology btw?
I'm too lazy to look it up, plus I probably won't understand it 💀
as someone who had never had an account on neopets, seeing "scientology" in a video about the controversies of basically the first virtual pet forum almost made me question if this was the right video
as someone who did have a neopets account i also questioned if this was the right video.
I was expecting her to say "and that's the least of all the controversies"
Sanitize, normalize, and glamourize is the next gatekeep, gaslight, girlboss.
😂 true. People need to remember that not everything SHOULD be normalized.
@@errortryagainlater4240 huuuuuuuuh, normalize not normalizing?.?....
Equal and opposite energies
mostly unrelated, but i'd honestly love to see an attempt to sanitize horror and have it still be horror afterwards
"The Nine-Year-Old Who Ran An Organized Crime Ring On 'Neopets' Is The Internet's New Hero" and whoever it was they still are...
I wish I was the kind of nine year old who would do this. To that kid: I salute you
@@Spartacus005 I agree...at nine I was still struggling to learn to read 😂
I salute you, 9-year-old with a Neopets crime ring
Imagine investing in the neostock seeing a neocrash and getting into neodebt
underrated comment
And then your neowife neodivorces you and takes the neokids 😔
The great neodepression
Having to go neogambling to feed your neochildren 💔
What in the neofuck
the fact that this topic could warrant a 50 minute long video terrifies me beyond reason
Sickened, yet curious
I watched it while playing Minecraft. It was very enjoyable
Holy shit i didnt look at the video length yet
@@klypl1777 need some wine or apples?
Bruh, I would readily sip wine and eat crackers to the whole sordid history of Neopets. 💁
“Rest in peace, Tamponslut”…okay I nearly chocked on my drink from laughing so hard
I love how amongst all the vulgarity there’s just “Anyone play Mario Kart 8?”
i do
Same but I'm bad at it so :D
I do lol
Ikr lol
And the one that just says “I’m at seaworld”
my least favorite neopets controversy was when my older cousin told me he made a neopet named geodude before pokemon red and blue came out and I totally believed him
Lol that's such an oddly specific thing for him to lie about, I like it
this is embarrassing but my fave part of neopets was when i used the boards to find groups that would roleplay as warrior cats when i was like 10...
....i didn't know I wanted that but I did.
Yesssssssss sister
This was my experience with Moshi Monsters but with magical girl roleplays instead of cats 💀
this comment dug a memory out of my brain omg
when i was seven or eight i had a guild called 4trees or something like that where the only members were me and my six other accounts and i just roleplayed warrior cats with myself bc i was scared to talk to strangers LMAO
@@starfakename9293 that's amazing hahaha
It honestly surprises me that Sophie the swamp witch isn't a furry icon, the disrespect is too much
I've got good news for you! Among the neopets fanbase, she is!
a picture of her saying "trans rights" is currently my discord pfp
@@Arkantolas You, personally, are a legend!
@@GothicRomantiSystem I'm getting second-hand happiness from your comments-
This one
I remember my entire elementary having those McDonald’s plushies. I had the cat with the neck floof (can’t remember the name) And we’d all role play at recess.
Then one day It fell out of my pocket when I was walking home. Needless to say I was crushed.
Luckily I ended up finding it on the path to school. But there was some bad news…..a dog got to it and tore its back open.
Then my loving mother stitched it back together 😊bless her heart
This comment has more emotional whiplash than a K-Drama
What a rollercoaster 🎢
INCREDIBLE STORY I CRIED LIKE 50000TIMES READING THIS
A Wocky?
Mom of the Year. ❤️
I remember being perpetually disappointed because I wanted some of the nifty colors, but even basic paintbrushes were SO expensive that (when they were actually available for sale) it was just depressing to look at them.
I spent like 2 years scamming neopoints on the marketplace to buy 1 paintbrush...wish I could remember my account
Same thing for me. I could never come close to affording a paintbrush, but I did win a baby one from the Wheel of Excitment. I was 13 or 14, and I was so elated, it was like I had won $10,000 on a game show lol 😝
@@madelinetracy3847 oh ya that thing! Neopets was just gambling for children... And guess what I do for a hobby now lol
@@puffdaddy69 lament your poor life choices on RUclips?
@@tablescissors yes that and gamble. I'm a model citizen.
I officially left Neopets when they added a premium currency that cost real-world money. I felt lied to and betrayed because I had seen an early Q&A with TNT in which they said that Neopets would NEVER have any features that cost real-world money. I specifically remember that word “never”. I was surprised that nobody seemed to talk about that.
Donna and Adam never would have done that, but when Viacom buys you they'll do whatever they want to make money
Well it must've cost them a fortune to run the site and wanting a free to play game without microtransactions is entitled gamer behaviour at its finest.
@@weevil8025 buying a kids website to make money off children is pretty clearly the point of having bought neopets. I don't think it's especially entitled to say "don't exploit children"
@@philippak7726 Way to twist my words completely.
@@weevil8025 Can I ask what I twisted?
I agree running a site is expensive, and I understand asking for money. Making things loot-cratey on a site that goes for kids is what I object to
Also as far as I understand corporate buyouts, they don't happen unless the new company thinks they can wring money out of the thing they are buying.
Sometimes when I watch your videos I wonder if you're either much older than me or much younger than me but we're very online when you were very young. I remember feeding my neopets and my middle school library lol. I'm 30
I remember her saying that she's 19 or so.
You have such great taste Kat I swear
During Antoons drama she mentioned that she's a minor, so... Definitely younger!
Neopets has such a huge age range, I’m 24 and my cousin is 36 and we both played neopets when we were younger
@Kat Blaque were*
This made me remember how I scammed someone in my guild into giving me their lab ray map pieces. Also I had a neofriend who convinced me she was Emma Watson. Neopets was a lawless place.
Why would you do that?
@@deviantartguy0 I was like 7 years old????
Still iz! I convinced sum people in2 thinking im at time traveler frum 2012 (originally they assumed it wuz 2005)
I did worst and hacked entire accounts so I can stole everything they had.
I was 12. 🙈🙈🙈
@@kellykelly4361 Well I harassed the people I stole from and sent them the ugliest fucking default pets
The fact that people are doing deep dives into the weird shit I got into in middle school brings me a great deal of joy. It's *history* now.
Can I just say how funny it is that “UC” is being used to refer to rare vintage neopets 😭 I go to UC Berkeley but now my brain reads it as “unconverted Berkeley”
I hang around in the Art RolePlay Game community and UC often is used to mean 'uncommon' (as in the rarity tier of something). So hearing everyone going nuts over that acronym was certainly something.
I keep thinking Universal Century from Mobile Suit Gundam.
Oh my god 🤣 reading your comment made me laugh out loud, thanks 🦋
wait until you hear about UC adoptions and the common process of writing applications😅
Youd have people review your "UC applications"😅
Transfer to Merced and you can go to University of California Unconverted Merced
Me: Hasn't thought of Neopets in 15 years.
Also Me: Time to watch a 46 minute video about Neopets controversies.
same
😭😭😭😭same
Right? I just logged into my old account and I got an unconverted pet!!!!!....wtf do I do???
@@kitterz8529 Time to put it out of its misery... 😢⛈️
It's been fifteen years, they're starving
I've got to be honest, as someone that has a nearly 19 year old acount, I can't believe it's still going.
Feels weird knowing that there's a neopets account that's the same age as me
Your account is 19? I'm 19. I feel so old now.
@@multimediacelebritypoker My sign up date is October 23rd 2002. I feel old! Haha.
Your account is older than me
@@hurricanebtvs My birthday is March 5, 2002. That's so crazy how much time has passed.
This gave me flashbacks of 7-8 year old me trying to understand the stock market, failing miserably and logging everyday for the free omelette so my neopets wouldn’t die of hunger, I was a very poor but loving parent
Can we appreciate how pretty Izzzy looks like in all these videos? It looks like they put in a lot of work to their makeup alone in each video, nevermind all the effort in these vids
I literally come here for the outfits mostly
Izzy's looks are so different each time and I'm always impressed by how they look lmao
@@mitsuwaltz FRRR
She looks like a goth that is not sorry for party rocking.
Yessss, their makeup looks awesome every video
Yeah she does look nice
I once had an orange cat named Garfield, I think that this was good context to say this-
they're tribble at this point and i am uneasy
garfield or gar_field027393939272xxx
Cool, I have a black n white cat named Frosty
My Neopets username was garfield207 like 20 years ago. This comment section is wild.
I can’t believe that for 27 minutes I completely ignored the army of Garfields behind you
I cannot go back
You opened my eyes 😳
WHY DID YOU DO THIS TO ME
I went the entire video without noticing until i saw this comment. Somehow i noticed the Garfield earrings but not the army???
Reminded me of Quinton Reviews
It took me 37 minutes.
Honestly, losing badly at gambling in a video game as a kid would have taught me a lot about gambling. Mostly how it's just not worth it. I remember games with minigames that were just gambling and a way of bolstering your currency. I would avoid them because I knew I'd lose.
nah cause same, that and years of losing at cards to my grandfather taught me ill never be addicted to gambling because i will be forever in debt
same, as a kid I remember considering the neopets gambling a thing that I'd most likely lose money at, and would avoid it, would only play it very occasionally if I wanted to, but I'd go prepared to lose some money
I mean kinda? I don't think gambling really is whether you "win" or "lose", but moreso the suspense of "what if" that gets people addicted. It all really depends if you're predisposed to that kind of high and if you have trouble controlling yourself, which I think kids probably do have trouble with the latter. Granted I'm not a psychologist in any way, shape, or form, but I can kind of understand their reasoning for locking it for 13+
Unfortunately neopets gambling you're gonna make money overall if you play enough (unless they've changed it recently to be more forgiving)
Earlier controversies: Oh no they're shoving advertisements down the kids' throats and letting them do virtual gambling
Later controversies: Art changed, let's illegally get pets with the old art because it's rare
Even earlier controversies: "You can't say firetruck specifically as one word in the forums because it begins with f and ends in uck." Also, "HOW DARE THIS FLASH VIDEO SAY, 'I'll see you in Hell!' YOU CAN'T SAY HELL IT IS A SWEAR!!!"
This is like animal jam time traveling, but well, illegal
@@HKMcRooney I told people that I stole a flying donut of doom
I’m always blown away by Izzzy’s looks in each video. They’re so creative and put in so much effort for every aspect of the video!
I know I was staring at the glitter the entire time. It was pretty.
Same here, they always look amazing. The level of creativity and color in each one is amazing.
I agree the advertising was a lot. Even as a kid, I was like “this is ridiculous” because it got to the point that almost EVERY GAME was an ad and there were items for sale that were ads.
Agreed. I remember one game specifically that was literally just watching an ad and then getting neopoints from it. They really did the most with advertising lol
it is crazy and also very depressing how at the time ads that pervasive were considered "a lot" and advertising to kids was instinctively considered shitty by most, and now that is literally standard practice and kids watch 20+ minute long ads by choice because thats the majority of age-appropriate online content available
The only "controversy" I remember is when an Avent calendar day was bugged and it keep giving points so of course I got enough to buy a lab back in the day that December
That is amazing
it's a christmas miracle lol
OMFG DAT incident! I remember it, it kills me! Me and my older brother played the game at the time, maybe 9--10 years old, and when he realized the bug, he placed a weighted thingy on his spacebar and the mouse on the button and left it clicking like 24hrs! Dude made millions, bought a rare brush, painted his Lupe and hours later got his account iced lol
He didn't care cuz he felt acomplished and was done with the site, BUT they also froze MY account, thinking it was a second of his since we always sent each other stuff cuz brothers duh.
I am still salty about that 😂
I tried to fight the freeze but didn't get any reply and gave up; thanks for the trust issues neopets, learned that coporate doesn't care 👌
"Players who dont win enough points through gambling to feed their pets actually have to send them to a virtual soup kitchen" HAHAHAHAHA
Kinda sounds like a sad movie concept.
It's like when evangelicals said that harry potter taught kids how to do occult stuff when there was nothing of that sort at all, just fantasy magic.
LMAO
china
My grandma used to play neopets daily and was one of the richest people on the site from stock trading and then someone hacked her account and stole all her neopoints :(
I'm so sorry for her :(
Oh how the mighty have fallen
I may have been friends with your grandma in the early 2000's... That's wild.
Aw :(
Poor grandma :(
My mom always thought it was great that it taught me how to gamble and about the stock market. She thought it would encourage problem solving skills.
I wanna make a joke about being poor is a problem, but just mentioning it is fine.
Yeah! But now im just addicted to parlay betting
My parents had no problem teaching me how to play poker for spare change at about age 6.
@@Willbeezy2 Well duh! The stock market is just combining astrology with animal crossing and getting Kohl’s Cash.
My neopets account was frozen when I was 14 because I had stumbled upon some fake items in the money tree and sold them without realizing they were fake. Basically I just wasn't a super knowledgable neopets user and didnt use the forums so while I loved Neopets and used it daily, I had genuinely no idea that fake items were possible at all, I didn't even realize the items I was grabbing were rare or expensive, I just grabbed them because they looked strange. They were Thyoras Tear, which has a black background in the preview image rather than white. Apparently they're very sought after battle items (I never used the arena so I didn't know about it lmao). As of right now they're worth 33 MILLION neopoints, but back in the day I think they were actually worth a lot more than that. I grabbed at least 2 or 3, and when I saw the prices, I just figured it was the act of a very kind and generous user and I had a stroke of luck, but I was devastated when my account was frozen not long after selling. I know a part of it was my fault for being out of the loop, but it still felt so unfair. I just remember thinking about how, I was a teen, even though I had this account for a long time and would miss it dearly for the nostalgia, yeah I'd survive lol, but damn, imagine the LITTLE KIDS on the site who fell for that sort of thing getting their entire accounts frozen, and being blamed for the actions of adults using exploits that SHOULDN'T EVEN BE POSSIBLE, if the game designers just had a safer and better built website. It's just a lot of unnecessary fear and grief that should IMO have a better resolution than 'if you dont want to get in trouble for something you didnt even do, then don't get tricked in the first place kids!!' :///
the neopocalypse has the same energy as when there's a substitute teacher & the teacher yells at everyone the next day
Underrated
Bro. Neopets literally saved my life as a child. It gave me a legit purpose and helped me kick start my writing
so what are you writing about?
@@solmoman I’m guessing it was for petpage application. I had the same experience. Neopets made me a better writer 🤣
@@maddyG7414 ah maybe I misunderstood. I thought she ment like her career as an author or something, writing fan-fiction about neopets
Me too but drawing and coding!
Me too! Did you RP on the boards or post your writing? That was a major part of my time on the site lol 😝 In case you’re wondering, writing on Neopets was on a number of different topics, but most of what I gravitated towards was fanfiction for books (Harry Potter) but RPing was the main writing activity that I experienced on Neopets. For you young’uns, RP, “role playing”, collaborative story writing with your own or famous characters. Your friend would post a piece of the story from their character’s perspective and then you would post a piece of the story from your character’s perspective, etc. Could be done with multiple people. RPing ranged from books, shows, movies, comics, manga/anime, Neopets-related, etc. My writing got a huge shot-in-the-arm from my RPing, not to mention my editing/proof-reading skills, and I discovered my fictional prose/writing style. Since then, I’ve been published a few times and now I’m working on my first novel. Pardon this ol’ geezer Millennial’s ranting 😜
Oddly the history of neopets shows the progression of internet capitalism
Paintbrushes were the virtual equivalent of gold to me as a youngster. I remember checking the "secret" shops in the fairy village but never actually having enough NeoPoints to buy anything cool... Also, there was a battle arena for NeoPets where I always got my pets asses kicked, which made me a sad child. Good times.
My late wife learned HTML and coding as a kid from Neopets, as bad as it was in some regards, it was such an amazing way to help kids express their creativity. She also had a tattoo of our favorite beta Neopet, Scrunt🧡
It's how I learned HTML as well as a kid. Honestly pretty cool and educational!
It's how I learned HTML too! Sorry for the loss of your wife. May her memory be a blessing.
I also learned basic HTML all because of neopes
Me too! Does anyone remember signature making contests on the boards?
Me too!
Of all the controversy it's important to comoare to today - when gamifying gambling in childrens games and toys is super common and happens with Real money now - microtransactions, blind boxes etc.
its also now getting banned more and more. I honestly wonder how long until magic the gathering or pokemon get in trouble (again)
Gambling in Fable 2 got me into so much debt I eventually realised I couldn’t gamble my way out of that I think it taught me a positive lesson about gambling tbh.
I got an incredibly good laugh at The Jungle_Boo part...like, what is it with companies and being unable to admit they were telling false stories when caught by their users? Continuing to lie or to try to save face with shenanigans just makes everything a lot worse, and it's pretty insulting to the intelligence of a service's users.
Sounded like trolling to me
I created the original “nerd” named pet. Was astounded it was available so took that in a second.
My account had well named, painted pets with neocash clothes, completed lab ray, and millions of neopoints before it was hacked and everything was gone. I’m still mad about it tbh.
Contact neopets
I remember being under 13 when i signed up and much of the site - including the chats - were off limits without parent permission. No lie: i had to print off a permission slip and get my mum to sign and mail it! Could you imagine????
Oh wow, I blocked that off lmao! I remember printing that off but my mom never signed it. :/
I had to do this and send the letter of permission from my Dad to the US from the UK - seems so archaic now haha!
same it was like the first and last time i used the fax machine LOL
I just lied about my age. Years later when I got back into the game, it took months to guess the year I'd picked
omg i never got to use the forums because my mom didnt want to sign and mail the form
It's true that Neopets can easily convert pets back into UC. In early 2019 my long-term account had 3 UCs stolen, one was zapped by the lab ray into a converted kougra. I had enough proof for 2 of the UCs that I had owned them since I created them, so they returned them and reverted them back into UC for me. The 3rd was unfortunately lost, and through some digging, I found that it had been consistently passed around the pound chat and I was told it had gone through "too many users" to be easily given back and there was nothing they could do. Conveniently that same day the account that had it was frozen..it was all very strange but opened my eyes to how aggressively people were trying to get the accounts of inactive players.
I actually adopted an acara with the new artstyle but in 2014 the the vandagure was introduced, they also changed the acara and her profile pic is the v5 acara (currently we have the v6 acara)
I used my first paycheck on a virtual pet ten years ago - I bought a UC Plushie Bori for $450 when I was 16. I went and bragged on the trading forums, and then my 5 accounts and all of my sister's accounts were deactivated. Love that for myself.
Wait for bragging? 🤨
@@y0urcheapthrill For trading real life money for a product on site.
Fun fact: Another 'controversy' took place in the mid 00s when a young girl named Lisa Fu self-published a book full of stolen stories from the Neopian Times
Did they cover the story?
To be honest I'd love the option for us to change our neopets back to their older art. Just make a whole new line of "Retro Paintbrushes" for each older type and make them either super rare to find or a reward for competition.
Granted the art style would change but it just means their neopet is either really old or they were lucky since to avoid making the "Retro Paintbrushes" scammable; you would be unable to trade them and have a 30 day timer after use (to avoid swapping like mad).
So imagine "Retro Paintbrushes" like: "Retro Red Paintbrushes", "Retro 1st Draft Paintbrushes" or "Retro Royal Paintbrushes" and in some cases Brucie would be a Penguin parodying Bruce Forsyth again; but still a penguin, just wearing similar clothes and face.
I guarentee people would come back, new and old to try to get these old designs.
Would original bruce be a photo of a penguin wearing a suit?
People have talked about this for a long time - making a "Deconversion Ray" item or something that was bought only with real-life money could bring in so much profit for the site, but some people feel it would cheapen existing UCs.
@@funnybell454 One way could be that those who had a UC before the "retro Painbrush" came out, would get a unique special neopets badge on their pet; to signify its value.
But not just any badge. A badge that will have the Neopets logo on a golden emblem with red ribbon; one for the pet, one for the account holder.
That way original UC's are easier to spot, they are more valuable and even if they give away their pet; they'll still have that special badge on their own profile :D
@@kateb6699 Possibly. Although that idea is so good I'd make it an April 1st reward (for the whole of april though).
Where if you use the retro paintbrush then, you'll get the photo penguin bruce in a suit :D
omg, seeing those McDonald’s toys brings back a memory. I was OBSESSED with those. & when they were in-store, my aunt worked at a McDonalds. I remember asking her if she could get me some / take the display home after they were done with the promotion. She totally got to come home with the display, & I ended up having SOOOO many of them. I dunno if I still have them somewhere, I may have decided that I was too old for them or something. But it was so cash money.
Well if you still had all of them you could've selled them for cash money
For a reasonable price of course
@@toxic8129 Yeah, true! I’ll have to see if they’re at my dad’s place
i still have some of them. they sit atop my dresser and are a part of the council.
Haha if redeeming codes still works, that makes them worth even more 🤷🏻♀️
I have this but with animal jam toys from when I visited their company! They are so cute
The whole gambling controversy is so funny to me because when I was little, my aunt gave me her Mario 64 game for the DS. The gambling part of the game was my favorite thing to do. And no one bat an eye when I showed them I was learning how to play blackjack from Luigi 😂
That game was the reason I learned how to play poker! Knowing how to play poker helped me learn how to play other games like Five Crowns and Mahjong. I've bought lottery tickets ONCE when I became of age (18) but I still can't legally gamble until later this year (21). Even then I still have no interest in real life gambling. (Unless my family is playing a card game or Mahjong for money, but I don't think that's quite the same.)
I stopped playing after we didn't collect enough eggs for the egg hunt and they gave us DUNG PIZZA 😭 I was so offended 😫
Which Easter year was this? I was very young when I started playing Neopets and honestly never witnessed so many cool things that happened over the years of Neopets being online.
HAHAHAHAHAHHAHA
lmao I still remember that. It was like in 2014 or so?
I stopped playing club penguin because the Halloween update scared me so-
I'm not sure if Neopets saved me by letting me know at a young age that I'm easily addicted to gambling or if it created my gambling compulsion as a whole...
You should follow up with that Australian channel that made the original gambling segment lolol
My gambling addiction started on New Super Mario Bros on the DS lol
and now all the kids develop their gambling compulsions from gacha games 💜
as someone with gambling problems who also played neopets as a kid i relate to this all too well
Imagine finding out that the reason your personal information was leaked was because you had a .png of a Bruce Forsyth Penguin in 2003
I'm going to age myself by saying that I remember being an early "rich" Neopets player back when it was near impossible to save 1000 neopoints and own a single golden negg. My pride and joy at the time was my store full of rare, high-priced neggs... seems sad now, lol
I was an avid user when the market priced rare plushies in the hundreds of thousands.... I logged back on recently to see my plushie gallery previously worth millions now worth less than 20k.
😑🤌🏻
I remember when paint brushes weren't millions of neopoints 🫠 & I cried legitimate tears when I was hacked for 11k neopoints.
The best part is that even without the UC pet drama, the black market would still exist. There is 2 forms of currency on Neopets: the free neopoints, and the (paid for with real money, excluding a few situations) neocash. The way neocash items are sold is straight-up awful- there are a couple items that stay consistent (such as basic wigs and clothing), but the majority of items are only available for a short period of time and when they're gone, there's no legal way to get them outside of trading since they cannot be bought and sold in a regular market. What this means is that if you want, say, an Aisha dress sold for neocash in 2014, you either have to already have a neocash item that's equally as valuable (which is nearly impossible for new players), or... you can just buy it off the black market for $1-$25 dollars. Needless to say, most players willing to use the black market choose the latter.
This could of course be fixed by having a regular resale market for neocash items, but this is Neopets- of course there isn't.
damn, that sucks
15 years has passed by and I still couldnt feed one of those kadoties so forget about the regularity of nc...
all I learned about stocks on neopets is to never invest on them, just save your money on the bank to become a diamond plus client or whatever it was called. this video brought back memories I didn't know I had
What I learned from having a shop was, it'll be cute for a minute and then someone will steal your account and take everything from your shop and leave you with nothing. Survive on the bare minimum yourself, and nobody can steal your ish.
Neopets gambling just taught me that it was not a reliable way to make money lol
Yeah I learned that I should never use real life scratch cards because I get sucked in and overspend on them, which I suppose I was lucky in that it helped me learn that about myself versus kickstart a real-world scratchie addiction lmao
This is the effect Fable 2’s gambling had on me as a child. I spent hours trying to win my money back, hoping to just hit the jackpot or whatever, yet I just wound up more and more in debt. Occasionally a win gave me hope, but ultimately I could never get back to where I could break even again. Eventually I gave up, got arrested, and had to do community service.
So I learned some things about myself and about gambling. I learned that it was just a waste of time and money, and there are better ways to make cash.
@F Karma is there any "being good at gambling"? isnt the whole point is that chance plays at least a large role in whether you win? i dont gamble and ive always kinda wondered this lol
@@genericname8727 "there are better ways to make cash," like purchasing every business and household in the country to suck the entire continent dry.
@@willyeeton4390 well, yeah, it didn’t teach me to be ethical just not to be a gambling addict lol.
Also, I probably earned a significant percentage of my money working as a blacksmith for ages. Time and effort into perfecting a skill I spent time and effort working on until I was wealthy enough to exploit the other hard workers. Yay, capitalism.
This video helped me remember the name of Petz Dogs 2, a childhood favorite video game that I couldn't remember the name of for YEARS. THIS HAS LITERALLY BOTHERED ME FOR YEARS. (I recognized the music from the game and saw the music sited in the description)
I used to play that on the my DS! It had all kinds of mini games and decorating options.
OMG I loved that game. And also used to play Neopets around the same time.
@@brelonwy I think the DS version was actually different from the wii version, but they had the same name!
HOLY FUCK I USED TO PLAY PETZ 5 ON PC AS A KID THAT'S WHAT IT'S CALLED??
This can't possibly be nearly as bad as Marapets right-
"SCIENTOLOGY AND SHADY ADVERTISING"
Marapets was downright racist and offensive, full well knowing it and not giving a damn.
Neopets is simply making a few mistakes here and there that get them in far more trouble that it's worth, but they do do their best to actively fix said issues.
@@inkling457 I do honestly think that Marapets is so much worse. My comment was only about the subtitle of "SCIENTOLOGY AND SHADY ADVERTISING". It admittedly caught me off guard. Still, Mara is so much more problematic for the reasons mentioned.
okay i know of marapets existence but never played, what did marapets do im genuinely curious
@@lionkid5841 search Marapets on youtube and the first video works
@@lionkid5841 Izzyzzz has a video on it. Basically Marapets had a bunch of racist and fat phobic content on their site and when they were called out, the owner of the site decided to throw a hissyfit on Twitter. Also they didn't pay their site artists. So uh, not great.
oh man. this reminds me SO much of animal jam, from the selling items to unavailable items being super rare. even accidentally trading for hacked items and getting banned. this kind of makes me want to make an animal jam version of this format.
please animal jam was insane 😭😭 i never had an acc but everyone i know who did was an avid trust trader
All I remember about rares from animal jam is that every other kid had one.
oh man you just made me remember desperately trying to get "beta" items on that game... good times
I got banned multiple times for trolling... little me started making dozens of of accounts to see how quickly I could get banned 😂
I love how you can tell how users tried to swerve the filtering system in the early days, just because of the amount of variations of the word “cake” that are banned lol
Urban Dictionary says it means a ss. If it wasn't for that website, I would have no idea what that slang meant.
This is my favorite izzzyzzz video yet. Top tier. RIP Tamponslut
The funny thing about the gambling games on the site is that they definitely made me LESS likely to gamble as an adult. After wagering my virtual money and making no profit, I went "Wow, gambling really is a waste of time, huh?"
SAME
Banned words on neopet: like 13 instances of Cake, 6 of which are just the word cake itself with no changes whatsoever.
Glad I'm not the only one who noticed that lmao
"If you had a neopets account your information is out there"
I hope they like definct yahoo email addresses that belonged to a middle schooler
lmaooo the email address i used for my neopets account was probably like XxX_MyChemicalRomance_XxX or some shit
@@xoPrettyOddox Mine was xXx_Scene_Dinosaur_Rawr_xXx hahahahahah
narutodemongirl I cri
@@xoPrettyOddox XxX_KawaiiEmoGurl_xXx 💀😭
@@blondevlogger mine was Meer_Dark_Angel
Apparently I lost interest before they went with sponsored stuff from McDonald's and Coca-Cola in-game, because I have no memory of that whatsoever.
I do remember sneaking up to take chunks out of a giant omelet randomly lying on the ground, various colored snowballs and cannons as weapons/items, and the fact that there was always a Skeith named "turdmuncher" in the pound.
I remember looking at Neopets when I was young and I was so confused by it, I wasn't able to understand its website or how it exactly worked so I pretty much missed out on the Neopets childhood nostalgia train.
Talk about absolutely wild with how much I missed out on and knew absolutely zero about.
Hi five. Club Penguin instead?
I was more of a Webkinz player myself.
I played for like a year but became obsessed with Habbo
I remember playing a game on there abt a blue dragon fighting his way through a dungeon and that was abt it. I loved petpet park though but I never got involved in neopets bc it didnt feel as interactive
Me too, I wasn't around for most of these virtual worlds since I was basically only on the internet to look up pictures of animals or pokemon that I could 'save' by tracing them on paper (since we only had 1 computer for the whole family) or play browser-game after browser-game on sites like Zylom when I was a kid.
I felt a bit intimidated by the internet back then and only stuck around on the sites my parents introduced me to for the longest time.
I only got interested in these types of games in recent years, having been one of those saddened to hear about Fer.al's shutdown and nowaways mostly spend my time on Flight Rising.
Poptropica was really bad about targeting immersive ads. I don't really remember the ads on neopets, but damn I remember the collabs and stuff on poptropica and how weird that made me feel
Same, there was so many! My sister and I would tag-team on poptropica, and we usually avoided islands branded with like diary of a wimpy kid, or big nate, or whatever else. But those damn advertisement screens you had to run past to get to the next area? Annoyed the fuck outta me. Just let me go to the next place!
I used to love Poptropica. My sister and I were obsessed with the cryptid island. Amazing how little I noticed all these ads, I wasn't that young when I frequented Neopets and Poptropica.
@@nope6021 The creator of poptropica wrote diary of a wimpy kid so that one's not that surprising
@@CK-ot2dt I know, but it was still kind of annoying just how saturated the advertising for it was.
If anything the fact that we didn’t pay much attention to the Neopets ads is worse though. Like, they were way better at planting brands in your head without it raising your BS radar.
I find it hilarious the first thing people do when they find out that all rules have gone out the window is to go absolutely wild
I laughed so hard when I heard that a mother was outraged because her kid was playing virtual poker to feed their virtual pet because I never realized that that’s exactly what I was doing. Wild times.
Well tbh not so much to feed them as paint them. But hey I got my Royal Shoryu eventually so
This made me actually go check on my Blumaroo Boohooligan.
He's dying, yes but at least he's 500k neopoints in the bank soooooo
That’s a REALLY good name
That’s a pretty cool name. Since you can only have unique names I’d say it would be rare.
I've just logged into my old account, I've got a Unconverted kacheek called Noah. No idea what to do with it??
@@kitterz8529 Live stream yourself converting it
Looks like I have a female blue Gnorbu named Alpoki
Growing up i was really into Animaljam but i remember how quickly things fell apart with rare beta items becoming so popular and in demand, along with so many of the rumors and bullcrap that happened. some examples being:
Animaljam/Wildworks will turn an blind eye to pedophilia, racism, and other offenses as long as you're known in the community (example being Hyenine1, you can find his drama everywhere)
hackers.. oh looooord the hackers (Fman, any AJ player would remember him)
Exploiters (such as the magenta item glitches, or fake headdress trades that would ban both accounts)
also the fact that the players can and will throw a baby to get their dream items.
God , i remember playing animal jam alot as a kid.
@Spare Bun oh my its a large can of worms.. its not my place to go around saying it... but what I know is the allegations is he groomed an underaged girl and then when she came forward about it Chocolate4froggy told her to stop being a drama queen. hes also drawn pretty gnarly things such as sexualizing vore, the confederate flag.. stuff like that- against all odds Animaljam has kinda ignored it...?
as I said this is my basic knowledge on the matter but you can honestly look it up anywhere and find the tea
why am I obsessed with the deep dives about nostalgic childhood toy franchises
For context, I'm 26 now.
I started Neopets when I was around 6 or 7, and I remember finding/being on the message boards when I was about 11 or 12. There were likely so many predators there - I remember people forming online relationships, myself included! I also remember when you could create a new, blank page to link on your profile where you could format the page with your own pictures, text, etc. I was learning to code at 12 🤣 I miss those days.
Oh my god, same here! On everything you said, even to the age 😂 I remember making drawings of my pets and creating a full on mary sue lore and learning html tables to make the page all fancy
Oh yeah the coding! All I did was fill my page with that one dancing Sloth gif. I thought it was so funny I showed everyone I knew.
you should make a video about toontown online :) the rise and fall, popular toontown youtubers, toontown rewritten and other servers drama and the fated toontown rewritten app!!!! I can help you with info since I have played toontown since 2003 :) hmu!!!
yessss this would be AMAZING
Ah!!! There’s so much to talk about!!!! Do you remember the little letters and cards they would send out every month ? I really hope they do a vid on this because my nostalgic heart would absolutely burst
yes this would be so great!!
Yes!!
I still adore and play Toontown till this day!
Whether its Rewritten or its Corporate Clash
I would love that!
Now that flash player is out, the site is literally DOOMED. No neohomes or arcade games, and a lot of the wheels no longer work bc flash is required. Neopets is fucked now... Unless you like to collect for galleries there, tbh.
Neopets is updating to a flash preservant version and there’s ways to play the games via emulators, Trudy's Surprise works, idk abt the rest
yeah i took a look at neopets a little while ago and there were like 4 games left or something like that. it's a super watered down version of what i played as a kid.
The site seems buggy too. I popped in a couple weeks ago because I was feeling like playing and stockpiling neopoints again, but the remaining games are abysmally low in quantity and for some reason I had a hard time actually submitting my score, it kept bugging out. It was sad to see so few games left! They've known about the Flash collapse for years now, I have to assume this is down to mismanagement or lack of budget...or both.
That’s so sad wtf
They shot themsleves in the foot getting rid of key quest, habitarium etc in the first place, and then not being prepared for flash to go on top of that...? really donked it :/
I rewatched “RIP Tamponslut” about 5 times and I am CRYING from laughter 💀💀😂
im realising that we’re really old
to think people my age can make nostalgic videos like this now
I don't remember being uncomfortable with the ads, I just thought the sponsored items were tacky and undesirable, as well as the games being generally worse.
Yeah I feel like a lot of people including myself naturally avoided them. Like, ew, why are you invaldjng my perfect and cute escape from reality reality with the ugliest parts of reality reality? Gross
@@Bighugegeniouse that's a great way to put it! Exactly
Ah neopets, the first place where I encountered creeps online at the age of 10. Seriously, no one warned me about the creeps online, I just wanted my cat creature to have a blue cloud coat.
Sounds like poor parenting...
@@lindsey9958 Idk, kinda sounds like creeps on the internet to me.
@@lobstermilk It's both
@@lindsey9958 Kids are going to run into creeps no matter what. That doesn't necessarily mean that parents are to blame for this.
@@JustWannaPissYouOff yeah, wherever kids go, creeps follow. and parents could do better but creeps adapt to good parenting REALLY quickly
Y’all KNOW that during the ‘day of sin’ that it was most likely children doing a lot of the cussing lmfao-
I mean- children are chaotic. Those posts were acting like it was JUST adults cussing on those forums when there were probably children in the middle of that chaos too lol
If it were me on there, as a grown-ass adult, I'd probably just be saying "Avril Lavigne lol"
I was lmao that day, there were topics that were just like "Y'all need Jesus"
I was like idk what's going on but this is pretty funny....
Tbh I would have probably joined in but would have probably just made a silly reference or joke
I was afraid to post even something within the rules because I didn't want to get frozen. 😆
this is insane. im so glad we all remember Neopets. i specifically remember one girl named snoopy who was like *the* best with making guild layouts and had THE COOLEST painted pets.