“My pets, oh dear, my pets, I really love them even if they’re just little drawings on a screen,” said Adriana Freitez, a player in her 20s who has had her tiger-like pet Kougra for nearly 14 years now.
And as much of the website is breaking down after the recent discontinuation of Adobe Flash - critical software for the platform - these longstanding users are now taking its future into their own hands. These players, the majority of whom are women, according to Neopets, got their first tastes of coding, web design and animation on the site. While pandemic returnees discovered this digital world is like a living time capsule, a steady corps of committed users have been dutifully caring for this cyber village. Neopets rivaled other digital pet fads like Tamagotchi and was cross-promoted with small pet-like toys in McDonald’s Happy Meals, but over the years, it struggled to adapt to new technologies and attract younger generations of players, and, as a result, the website slowly stagnated. When Neopets was first introduced in 1999, it was an instant success among children browsing the internet for the first time, boasting 25 million users by its peak in the mid-2000s. For the uninitiated, Neopets is like Animal Crossing meets Pokémon meets early Myspace: The platform allows users to explore a charming, click-based universe and rear magical pets while building their own webpages and socializing on glittery chat boards. Many former users returned to their dormant accounts in the last year or so, driven by boredom, nostalgia or a desire for escape - the site’s team reports a 30 to 40 percent spike in usership in the months following March 2020. Kennedy isn’t the only millennial who logged back into Neopets during the pandemic. “It felt like coming home,” Kennedy, a 29-year-old web developer from Arizona, wrote over Neomail, the website’s internal email system. She selected a piece of “Thornberry Jelly” from her inventory, chose the “feed” option from a drop-down menu and clicked the giant yellow “submit” button, repeating this process several times until a dialogue box on confirmed that her virtual pets were “satiated.” With her pets happy again, Kennedy, who goes by the username “iplatypus,” realized just how comforting it was to see their smiling cartoon faces on the browser-based game she’d been visiting since 2003. Feeling terrible that she had neglected them, Kennedy sprung into action. Big blue tears of hunger and sadness ran down their cheeks. When Allison Kennedy visited her Neopets in May after a four-year hiatus, they were crying.
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