Did anyone else play on Neopets back in the day?
For those of you unaware, Neopets is a website where you can create/adopt your own virtual pet! You can play games to earn Neopoints, go on quests, fight your way through the battledome, visit shops to purchase items for your pets, and more!
I joined Neopets in the year 2000. My first Neopet was a blue Lupe.
Neopia is a vast world with many different zones you can visit, explore, and have fun in. Faerieland is a cloud city filled with faeries and expensive shops. Terror Mountain is an icy mountain filled with snow themed games. Haunted Woods holds multiple fetch quests and luck based carnival (cough cough RIP OFF!) games.
My personal favorite area was Tyrannia.
Even if you didn't like some areas, it was always worth it to check them out. Sometimes you could find Neopoints, Codestones, or even Faeries in a Bottle, just by zooming through pages!
Out of the dozens of available games, my favorite was Meerca Chase. You would zoom around collecting Neggs while avoiding the red ones. It was real exciting to collect a Fish Negg since they were so rare and gave tons of points! I remember for a short period of time if you got a high enough score, you would be rewarded with a Meerca Transmogrification Potion which would turn your pet into a Meerca!
Another thing I loved about Neopets was all the dailies. Tombola on Mystery Island would give you a free raffle ticket. You usually won nothing, or junk like Sand in a Bottle, but every now and then you'd win a great prize! Visiting Coltzan's Shrine in the Lost Desert would power up your Neopet every now and then. If you were lucky enough to come across the Snowager taking a nap inside Terror Mountain, you'd have a chance to steal one of his many toy treasures. And who could forget the Giant Omelette in Tyrannia?
Neopets was honestly a great website because you had so much to do. You could be an avatar or trophy hunter to pimp out your profile. You could become a battledome expert by buying powerful weapons and leveling up your pets stats. You could scour the Shop Wizard and flip items to become rich. You could even be a dung collector.
I hope this brought back some memories for the few of you who played Neopets over a decade ago!
Interesting post. I have an account there that is 11 years old. I haven't played the game with any amount of seriousness since about 2009. When I first joined, Neopets was already owned by Viacom and driven by commercialism and the money in people's wallets instead of the imagination of the original two owners, Adam and Donna.
To be honest, I think I only played the game for about one year before it went downhill for me. In 2008, they suddenly introduced the new style of Neopets art, only allowing a random few Neopets species and color combinations to remain as they were. In order to keep people around that disliked this change, they added pet trading for the first time, and that changed the entire feel of the site. The community began focusing on the "worth" of pets rather than simply adopting and exploring with pets, and slowly that transformed it into a place of elitists that turned their noses down to people with pets of "lesser value".
As of now, the site is owned by the company Jumpstart (an aged educational company known for the computer games it created in the 90's). Some people thought that change of hands would improve the site and bring it back to its roots, but in some ways it became worse. Viacom had the money to add things to the site, but Jumpstart's a smaller company with less resources. So now the site consists of about five or more different styles of art (new art mixed with the old style you show) and constant cash shop updates. All the events are rehashed each year and with the art of neopets themselves being so unappealing since the redraw (they used to have eight poses for things like being sad and defending themselves in a battle, and now they only have one), there's not really any reason worth returning to the game.
But at one point, yes, this game was unique and interesting.
I remember playing for a short while after Viacom purchased the game in 2006. It was a lot different for sure. the NeoCash stuff was a turn off to me. The game has deteriorated over the past decade without a doubt. I had no idea it was owned by Jumpstart now, though! I owned a few of their 90's educational games :O
Yeah, neopets was great. I remember when it fist came out it was like they were the stickiest site on the net, retaining the most pageviews per visitor.
Have a neopet:
hey bros on a side note, I am kinda working on a game a little like this, taking what I liked outa the early neopets, tamagotchi and digimon world on psx, so far ive only just gotten started but if you see it around join in every now and then and give me some advice, i could use some feedback and insight from people that have experience in the genre
I'll keep my eye out! Digimon World on PS1 was a great game. I remember ending up with Numemon so many times because I'd always miss the toilet lmao
haha I did. I checked on my account a couple days ago. I'm trying to remember my password. The best pet I have is a Tyrannian Uni. I'd play that wheel game everyday, and I won the paintbrush.
I totally forgot to mention paintbrushes! I loved those haha, although I never owned one myself. I used to play the Wheel of Fortune and Wheel of Mediocrity daily too.
Oh gosh, this brings back such memories. Meerca Chase was my addiction, and chasing after that damn fish Negg.
That game was my only chance at ever owning a Fish Negg heh, they were so rare
I miss Neopets. Tried getting back to my old account around ~2013 just to have some fun but trades/auctions were too slow.
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