Like many people my 💫age, I grew up playing Neopets. It was my first introduction to the internet, and maybe even video games themselves. I’d while hours away on Pirate Caves, IceCream Machine, Fetch!, and Tug ‘O’ War. I won the Poetry Competition once, a huge win for my inner budding writer. I𒁏 learned what a stock was through Neopets, too.
I didn’t have a gaming PC or any consoles till the mid-2000s, but Flash games worked perfectly on my Mac desktop, and that was enough for seven-year-old me. Eventually, most people grew out of it – playing Neopets just wasn’t cool as a teenager. I shifted gears to RuneScape and then to console gaming, but Neopets has always held a special place in my h🧔eart. How could it not, when it was the firs⛦t gaming community I was ever a part of?
If you feel the same, then I have good news. Neopets has been more or less dead in the water for the last decade, operating at a💧 loss aꦚnd barely staying afloat due to “ageing site features, a warning user base, and a lack of resources”, according to a from the development team. But now, the site has gone independent for the first time since 2005.
It was purchased by Viacom for $160 million in 2005 and sold to edutainment company JumpStart in 2014, which was acquired by Chinese game developer NetDragon in 2017. JumpStart was shut down last month, and Neopets hung in the balance – until it successfully negotiated a “management buyout deal”. T🥃he new Neopets team, now “free from corporate baggage”, is in charge of ♌decision-making and Neopets’ overall brand strategy.
Thank god. One of the first things it decided to do was to backtrack on Neopet’s bizarre Metaverse plans. Dominic Law, who helped shepherd Neopets into its new independence, was the one who sp♕un off Neopets Meta in an attempt to build a Web3 game based on the Neopets IP. The game would have allowed users to earn crypto tokens and digital items used to mine NFTs through mini-games and battles with other people’s Neopets, something that I’m sure appeals to Neopets’ historically biggest fanbase: children.
Play-to-earn games are 𝓡more for speculators than gamers, and cryptocurrencies are overall worth much less now than they used to be. It looks like the Neopets team has looked long and hard at its Metaverse concept and decided to scrap it, pivoting to designing a game that its community actually wants to play.
They’re instead making a social life-simulation mobile game where you play from the perspective of a Neopet, which is, at minimum, way better than obsolete metaverse tomfoolery and as of now seems ♔to not include NFTs or crypto at all. They’re also going to be working on the existing Neopets site in an attempt to “bring Neopets back to its glory days”.
Neopets will not be perfect or even near this quality benchmark for a long time. Years of being deprived of resources has taken its toll on the site, and it’ll take a while to reverse the damage that’s been done. But the team is working on bringing functionality back to classic games, fixing bugs, reducing mobile browser compatibility issues, and even bringing a new plot to the site.ꦯ I’m not typically a s༺ucker for nostalgia, but Neopets coming back to life might get me to dip back into my old favourite games and relive the good old days for a while. And guilt-free, too, knowing that my clicks are no longer going towards making companies think cryptocurrencies and NFTs are viable platforms to build games on.