Neopets is one of those games that's deeply embedded into my tastes and interests, has been ever since I was little, steadily holding onto roughly the same amount of influence as I get older somehow. I was exactly the right age to be getting into it when it was first coming up, right in the crosshairs of their target demographic being an avid early adopter of computer games who happened to love adorable pets and RPGs. It has a very charming web 1.0 energy there with it from the start, and no matter how many updates, changes in ownership, and attempts to rebrand could truly do anything about how old, busted, and oddly charming it is. Even at its lowest points, it was always a fun oddity with something to give.

I decided to speak about it now because I've been between Neopets phases for a while and considering jumping back on again. Also because Neopets is in relatively a good position right now. People might be familiar with the NFT scandal dictated by their parent company a few years back. Right around the death of flash, leaving much of their site unusable. Well, as the dust would settle, Neopets would be dropped by Jumpstart and since 2023, they would be fully independent. Relaunching quite a lot of the site and rebuilding many of the dead flash games for an HTML5 internet. I played on and off at several points since then and it was everything I was hoping it would be, and happy it's finally independent for the most part.

That being said, it's important to know there's always been a history of animosity with the owners of Neopets and the general userbase. Lots of people reading this may already know about any number of the scandals and at times it feels like you can hardly scratch the surface without learning about the forum and grey market drama too. Even now there are things Neopets does that I don't happen to like too, considering the way it moderates around bigotry and anti-bigotry. The typical cowardly things you'd expect paired with their continued Harry Potter sponsorships. I love Neopets in spite of these kinds of problems, though I don't think anyone who really loves Neopets is all that phased by the crass consumerism of the game because it's very baked into the games identity.

It's already kitsch in the ways only something from the 1999 internet could be, right? But the amount of garish ads, sponsorships, tie-ins being baked into the very identity of the platform is supremely tacky second only to Gaia Online. Independent as it may be, as it may have started, Neopets is deep in the Capitalism Kool-Aid, and you're going to have to get used to it to tolerate the site. And I don't just mean the tie-ins. I mean the way you can game stock markets and the bank to leverage your profits. The way it had all kinds of gambling games to introduce the many ways of wasting all your savings to the youth. Scratch cards, playing cards, betting, roulette, dice, there is no shortage of bullshit. Also, a very active and granular player market, auction, and speculative database of every item. You bet I game the fuck out of any of these if I can make a consistent profit, by the way.

My favorite source of income is from the Battledome, which also happens to be a great thing to touch on in general. So we have our Neopets, who have stats, which we can train, equip them with items, which we all get through the dailies and player economy. All so we could get into the arena, grind out battles in a turn based, mostly gear and training based, and somewhat luck based battles. You get achievements and all kinds of interesting items from the different enemies you fight, but also a ton of lucrative drops the higher you go which can be turned over for pretty easy profits. I genuinely love the cycle of the Battledome, and at some point would like to hit the end and train my Neopets to the max. Judging by how old Neopets is and how long it takes, I'm probably never going to hit the upper end. But it does give me something to build towards when I'm in the mood.

Here, I'm getting a little bit ahead of myself since I haven't even talked about the Neopets themselves. The game lives and dies by the Neopets, the guys, the creatures, the babies. At first you could hit a max of 4 but it's since been extended for everyone. They have a wonderful variety of all kinds of cute lil babies and I think they're pretty much all unique, especially the earlier generation pets. They get a wide variety of colors which you can change with paintbrushes, also feeding into that same player economy too. And the pets get their own pets, which they call PetPets. AND those PetPets get PetPetPets, and they're all so wonderful to collect, pore over see which ones you want and what brush you plan on using on which.

I really find them all so adorable, but I want to give special acknowledgment to MY current Neopets. FIRST, my adorable striped pastel Draik, who is my Battledome champion. I hatched her from an egg at the Forgotten Shore, a secret daily map which you have to assemble through treasure hunting. Another is a limited edition Neopet you can only get pretty much one day out of the year, a Cybunny with a cloudy color scheme. Last is my Zafara with a Christmas theme making her look more like an angel. I might pick up a fourth pet, but managing too many Neopets at once actually stresses me out.

A huge part of the game is the dailies. Probably the majority of the experience is going through them, and it can be unclear about which ones are even all that worth it. Which is why sites like Jellyneo exist, automating a lot of the process on custom user made checklists to go through all of the best ones without navigating through the site unnecessarily. All of the good wheels, all of the good random minigames and events, and quite a lot of the games which give you more money with very little effort. Through doing dailies, especially Trudy's Surprise and their new quest system, you can rack up quite a lot of money, well into the millions which I've already hit. Millions are not even a big deal, it's enough to get some of the more rare paintbrushes. It's that or the good Battledome items, not much else to do with the money but sit on it or spend it to train your pets. Overall, the dailies could be a lot worse and still have a unique flair to them which still feels decent and far better of a meta than a different modern pet game like Dappervolk, and not as mindlessly simple as Gaia.

To get more into the games on the site, there's quite a lot of them. Less than there used to be because of the death of flash, but still enough to have a good time. They preserved some of the best ones. A lot of them are just vehicles for getting Neopoints, while others are those garish sponsor games. Still, quite a lot of them are so good and so nostalgic that I get back into Neopets just to play them. Destruct-O-Match, Faerie Bubbles, IceCream Machine, and a lot more which really just send me back in time. They have such a wonderful cheesy and cute early internet charm to them. With the basic gameplay mechanics often matching popular arcade games, free sound library sound effects, and nice cheesy soundfont music.

If there was a centerpiece you could point to with what really makes Neopets special, besides the pets, besides the games, besides the bizarre scandals and memes, it would have to be the actual world itself. You don't just browse the site, you explore it. It's a whole globe which you can spin around and see all of the different lands with their different themes. Within them, all sorts of shops, links to games, battledome zones, daily events, quests, plot relevant areas connecting you to deeper longer running stories. They're all so whimsical and fun and really distinct in their identities from each other. My favorite area is Faerieland, obviously given I often use fae, demons and similar sorts of things in my profile pics and flavor on websites.

The faeries themselves are such a huge identity of the site and all of its lore. They're usually there to empower the pets and to set them on quests. They're pretty much mostly benevolent except for the dark faeries, and have such a timelessly cute feminine aesthetic which I've always loved. Two of them I love a lot are Illusen and Jhudora, the former is a powerful earth faerie with a green and brown color scheme, the latter is a similarly powerful dark faerie with a purple and green aesthetic. You can only do quests for one at a time, and the rewards are profoundly better than other fae quests. They hate each other, a lot. They fight, they argue, gossip about each other, they're clearly bitter ex girlfriends and the storyline of the site loves to milk it too. I love them so much and usually like to take on Jhudora as a profile pic, and my girlfriend does the same with Illusen.

Other overarching story details of Neopets are honestly beyond me at this point and I haven't done enough to brush up on them, but there's a lot to get into, and a lot of them have video game tie-ins which you could log here on this very site. Which I plan to! This is a promise, not to any of you, but myself, to play all of the Neopets video games because it has been too embedded into my life for me to not try them before I die. I will understand the DEEP LORE Of Neopets and report back to people here on this site (originally backloggd) so if anyone happens to ask me what the deal is with the Darkest Faerie, I'll be able to tell them. I'll be able to explain what the hell the Darrigan are supposed to be, and also why the Grundos cry themselves to sleep and eat gross food.

I'm not kidding in how much I adore this series, and have throughout my life. There was a period where they had a magazine, and even though I never had much of a chance to buy it myself at that age, I was able to get my hands on at least one of them. I had some of their collectible cards too. Even toys, some from department stores and some from fast food places. I don't have any Neopets merch on me now except for a Kougra I managed to find at a thrift store. Given I'm an actual adult who can buy whatever I want now, I just might actually try to grab a few of those magazines or old toys if I could manage it.

As early as five years old seeing an older girl playing it and asking what it was, I remembered that first impression so strongly. It was everything I wanted. A computer game, an advanced virtual pet far more complex than anything I'd seen before. There was a plausible deniability of coolness for me to escape into the more feminine elements of it, which I badly needed at that time of my life. I remember my first account which I have no chance of getting back into, with my mutant scorpio and invisible Grarrl. I will always love Neopets so much, even if it's objectively, even while independent, pretty scumfuck. And when it wasn't independent, it passed through the hands of scientologists and crypto shills. It's a deeply mixed bag, but it's a pillar of my childhood. I LOVE NEOPETS YAYY