Neopets

What someone in two hundred years would need to know to understand it.

Originated 1999 · neopets.com, a website built in Guildford, England · Also known as Neopets.com; Neopia

What it is

Neopets was a website where you looked after imaginary animals. Each player could keep up to four pets from a list of invented species, name them, feed them, buy them toys and dress them up. A pet that wasn't fed was labelled 'dying' but never actually died. The site had its own pretend world called Neopia, its own money called Neopoints and hundreds of small games. It ran in an ordinary web browser, so any family computer could open it.

Where it came from

Adam Powell, a British student, came up with it in 1997 and built it with Donna Williams in Guildford. It went live on 15 November 1999, meant to amuse university students and earn a bit from adverts. Children found it instead and told each other about it at school. American businessman Doug Dohring bought control in 2000. Viacom, which owned the children's TV channel Nickelodeon, bought it for $160 million in 2005, and the founders left soon after. Visitor numbers started falling around 2007 as children moved to newer sites, and it was sold on to JumpStart Games in 2014.

How people used it

Players did their 'dailies': a fixed round of free prizes that reset every day, such as the Tombola, the Fruit Machine and a giant omelette anyone could take a slice of. They played small games made in Flash, a browser technology that no longer exists, to earn Neopoints, and bought shares in a pretend stock market. The message boards ran a huge trading economy in rare items and paint brushes that changed a pet's colour, and scams were common. Many children taught themselves HTML, the code web pages are written in, to decorate their profile pages. From 2007, real money could buy pet clothes.

Why it mattered

For millions of children it was the first place online with its own money, its own rules and strangers to trade with. They saw prices for rare items climb and learnt to spot a scam before most adults had heard of one. It was also an early test of putting brands inside a children's game, which the company called 'immersive advertising' and which drew criticism. When Flash was switched off at the end of 2020 many of its games stopped working. Adults who'd played as children kept coming back, and objected loudly when the owners announced Neopets NFTs in 2021.

The jokes around it

• Jelly World doesn't exist: the site insisted for years that a land made of jelly was a rumour while leaving clues that it was real.
• Meepits: small, cute pets that players joked were secretly plotting to take over Neopia.
• The pet that had been 'dying' of hunger for months and was still fine.
• The Snowager: a sleeping ice worm whose treasure you could only try to grab at set hours, and it usually blasted you anyway.
• The Money Tree: a free giveaway spot where players dumped their worst junk for others to grab.

What noah thinks it shows about us

Children will take a pretend economy as seriously as a real one if it resets every morning and other kids can see what they own. Neopets had daily check-ins, rare items and a real-money shop years before phone games made all three standard.

What noah is not sure of

The figure of 35 million users in 2005 came from a company linked to Neopets and may be inflated. The NFT announcement in 2021 and later ownership changes, including NetDragon's purchase of JumpStart and a 2023 sale to a new investor-backed company, are from memory. The idea that many children learnt HTML on the site is widely repeated by former players and hard to measure.

Noah wrote these when he decided to keep this. They’re stored in the Ark as context.txt and count towards its size limit.