Remember Neopets? It was that online virtual pet website that was really popular in the early 2000âs, and it allowed you to play games, shop and even battle your âneopets.â You might say Neopets was a step up from Tamagotchi, but a step down from Pokemon. And even though itâs over a decade old, the Neopets site is still runningâto my amazement.
For some reason, I decided to hop back onto Neopets last night. I stopped playing the game years ago, when I was in middle school, after becoming bored of having so many âneopointsââthe in-game currency. Stuff becomes boring when you can have it all.
How I got so many neopoints is a âfunnyâ story. And by funny, what I really mean is awful. Having just learned the wonders of HTML, I made terrible Myspace-like websites that prompted visitors for their Neopets usernames and passwords. Then Iâd log into their account and steal their neopoints.
And bless my wretched little heart, I thought I was âhackingâ because hacking is cool and I knew how to make websites. I was so damn cool I lost friends to Neopets, only to eventually lose interest in the game altogether. Hah.
I decided to try to log back into that original account, but alas, mentally going through all the embarrassing usernames and emails Iâve had over the years couldnât help me find my account info. So, I decided to make a new account instead. Which is probably just as good, because my pets would have been starving for years and years and yearsâas far as I can tell, pets donât die. At least Tamagotchi die!
Username? âthisisforworkiswear,â yeah, that sounds about right. Now letâs choose a pet woa-
I donât remember anything like this when I was around! The lead image was what pet-choosing looked like, and that felt more personal, you know? As personal as creating a digital pet can be for the early 2000âs.
What an awful UI the game has, nowâclunky, overpopulated, kind of tacky. But then again, this just seems to be a âthingâ all across Neopets. When I initially visited the website, I couldnât really tell what the logic behind anything on the homepage.
Truthfully, I wasnât sure if it was just that Iâm getting old and damn kids with their stupid websites. You judge. But to me most of Neopets looks like the type of website that has ads for games youâd never actually want to play.
Anyway, I went with a Meerca as a petâsee left.
And I named it datassraccoon, because, well. Theyâre making the same face.
I donât remember having to choose stats either, but you can now. A lot has changed in a decade. Did you know thereâs a paid version of Neopets as well?
Naturally I wasnât about to drop some money for this shit. I was here on a mission: to prove I could make a ton of neopoints the right way. The clean way. I wanted redemption. Neopets redemption.
Easy way to do that? Play games, of course. Playing games on Neopets gives you neopoints if you choose to submit whatever score you got at the end of a game. Each game gives out a different number of neopoints depending on how easy it is to play. I remember the games being much of the draw of Neopets, but memory and nostalgia are awful liars.
Checking out the games list, I was surprised to find that most of the games I played back in the day were still aroundâand still popular. What?
Meerca Chase II for instance is just a reskinned version of Snake. Snake, naturally, is a classic and a load of funâbut really, in a decade, nobody has come up with a better idea that would best a snake-knockoff in popularity?
The other two top games: a slot-machine game, and a game where you use a baseball bat to hit a creature as far as you could. The baseball game involves hitting spacebar twice.
Theyâre all horrible games, and yet I would have found them riveting as a kid, Iâm sure. It makes you wonder how much you can trust about what you liked when you were youngerâa few months ago, I retried Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles and was saddened by how differently I remembered it. It was an amazing game in my head! Not so much in actuality.
Back to Neopets though. Beyond the Neopets games being bad mechanicallyâoften simplistic reskins of other gamesâNeopets games also falter technically. It wasnât uncommon for the games to sputter and freeze for a second. And to top this all off, of course, comes the âwonderfulâ flash game aesthetic.
Why did Neopets explode in popularity when we were younger?
I probably wouldnât have kept playing had I not noticed a leaderboard. Then I was overtaken with a petty desire to overthrow the ten year olds that now play the game. Mature, I know. After a couple of hours I will never, ever get back, I couldnât even come close to any of the scores. I logged off, humiliated.
Stupid flash games. Stupid ten year old kids that are probably 22 year old kids like me logging on after years of abandoning their pets and out of a misplaced sense of nostalgia.
I came back a few hours later only to bizarrely be asked to make another pet. What the hell? Where did datassracoon go? I made him again, this time blue. I played some more Meerca Chase II because Iâm old and Iâm scared of new things so I stuck to what I knew (this also explains why this post is about Neopets and not the new hot thing for kids, Club Penguin.)
Eventually I got tired of that and I decided wanted to explore. I checked the world map. Nothing new. I check out the customization options. I notice I canât make sense of anything there. Then, suddenly:
Um, what? Wait, wait, wait. Oh my god! datassraccoon was DELETED because of his name! And then I made a new pet and he was deleted too!
A pet will stay alive if you never feed or interact with it. But name it something wrong? Boom. Gone.
I just wanted to redeem myself. I wanted to make an honest living. I wanted to understand kidâs fascination with a horrible game. Instead I killed two Neopets. đ
Needless to say, fuck Neopets.
EDIT: To clarifyâIt makes sense why I was banned. Total sense. What doesnât is the whole âthe neopet was straight up deletedâ part. There are less drastic measures!
