Have you spent your childhood playing Neopets? Well, I know I did! The game is still alive, but is it still FUN?
Neopets: the OG Virtual Pet Website!
If you were a kid or a young teenager during the early 2000's, you probably already know what Neopets is. Neopets was the most popular "Virtual Pet Website", in which players could create, customize and take care of virtual pets.
The concept of Neopets was quite simple: you adopted a Neopet, and then you took care of him by giving him food, medicine, toys, clothing, etc. Those items were all obtainable by playing flash games, by purchasing them on hundreds of in-game stores, or by doing in-game events and activities: doing quests, playing scratchcards, etc.
It was a very addictive game, having reached a peak of more than 30 million active monthly users! With Neopet's success, dozens of similar virtual pet websites popped on the internet: Sylestia, Subeta, Flight Rising, etc. But none of those reached even a fraction of Neopets' playerbase.
There were dozens of Neopets species, ranging from cute flying Dragons (Scorchios, like the green one on the picture above) to weirdly-looking cats with ET antennas (Aishas, like the red one above!)
The website became VERY popular during the years 2000 for a huge variety of reasons:
- The website offered hundreds of free-to-play mini-games, like Sutek's Tomb (a "Match Three" game), Destruct-O-Match III, Dubloon Disaster and Meerca Chase 2 (the neopian version of the classic game "Snake"). Those games not only were free but they also were ran on any kind of computer and were kids-friendly, making them ideal for childrens that were just discovering the internet.
Neopets offered a huge community outside the browser games themselves, including a very active economy (players could earn Neopoints playing games and doing other activities on the site, and use these Neopoints to trade items with other players), forums, guilds, holiday festivals and contests (like user-created art). Not only that, but there was a huge array of fansites that offered game guides, had tools like alerts to seasonal events, and gave tips and tricks to solve quests: the most popular fansites were TheDailyNeopets, JellyNeo and SunnyNeo.
The website offered a free website for your pets, in which the players could customize their page with HTML coding. You have to remember that, back in those days, having a website was usually difficult and expensive, but Neopets offered a page for all the players. Thus, lots of kids that aspired becoming coders or graphic designers ended up on Neopets to try their newly-acquired skills!
Meet Luizeba, the Sketch Kougra
As you can see, I'm not really creative with names, and everything gets named as Luizeba. Hive account? Luizeba. Neopets? Luizeba. RPG Character? Luizeba. Deal with it 😂
My Neopet is a Sketch Kougra. Each species of Neopets (in this case, Kougra) have dozens of "colours", ranging from basic and obvious ones (like Brown, Green and Yellow) to more creative ones: Stealthy (with Ninja clothing), Magma (with fire all around them) and Relic (as if they were a Statue).
There's even "meta" Colours, like 8-Bits (in which the pets are drawn using 8-bits art) and even Invisible (yeah, they're literally invisible and you can't see them).
A HUGE part of the game was, and still is, trying to have your "Dream Pet", which means having the desired Species/Colour combo. Just a few Colour/Species combination were available to be created right off the bat when you created your accounts: the majority of the Species and Colours were only obtainable in-game, by the use of rare magic potions and other items that would convert your Neopet into the desired Species and Colours. These items are incredibly expensive to be purchased from other players, and the acquisition and trade of them is one of the pillars of the game.
Flash is Dead! And What About Neopets?
As you probably know: Flash is dead. Flash Player was a very popular platform used by websites in order to play videos and games. It was discontinued in 2020, and since January 12, 2021, it's being blocked by modern browsers like Chrome and Firefox.
A fair part of Neopets was based on Flash, including the majority of the mini-games and some other important features like Customization and World Map, and even some of the Main Quests (called "Plots"): all of that became unavailable. As it was expected, the whole game borked when Flash stopped running.
The developers knew that this would happen, and they started creating a Mobile-Friendly version of Neopets that ran on HTML5 and, obviously, without Flash. While they were able to convert the majority of the pages to HTML5, just a few mini-games were converted, and there's a huge backlog of features and games to still has to be converted and fixed.
The tech-savvy players found ways to bypass the death of Flash in order to play the old games and to access the now-inaccessible features of the game. The main strategy was using Browsers that still accept and run Flash content, like Pale Moon, Waterfox, Puffin and Basilisk Portable. I've been using the last one, Basilisk Portable, without any problems. Nonetheless, it isn't a secure solution, as Flash was discontinued for a reason: it was full of exploits and security issues.
But the sad truth is that the whole community knows that the majority of the mini-games won't ever be converted to HTML5, as almost no one was playing them anyways. Nostalgia aside, the mini-games didn't aged well, and any cheap smartphone with Android can run WAY better games. The developers won't spend manpower and money to convert stuff that no one uses.
The main feature of the game that still attracts players in 2022 is the Pet Customization. The players are still trying to get the best-looking Clothes and Backgrounds, the cutest PetPet (yes, Neopets can have their own Pets, and it's the best thing in the world!), the perfect Pet Species/Colour combination. And all the Pet Customization was converted to flash-free formats!
My current goal is being able to afford a PetPet called Spring Snowbunny, a fluffy white bunny with a flowery tiara: he looks very much the same as my (real life) bunny, Felix, and I want one on Neopets too. Obviously it's one of the most expensive items of the game and costs an astronomical amount of 100 Million Neopoints and I probably won't ever be able to afford it. 😅
The second part of the game that's very popular is the BattleDome, a PvP arena in which Neopets fight against each other using badass equipments. The PvP scene is very competitive, and the meta evolves everytime a new item is released. Thankfully, the BattleDome was 100% converted to HTML5, and can be played without any problems nowadays.
The list above is from JellyNeo and shows the current meta of the BattleDome Equipments. As you can see, the battle system is very developed, including several elements (Death, Fire, Water, etc.), defensive and offensive items, healing and reflecting effects, several usage rules (multiuse, once-per-battle usage, etc.). Battling is complicated on Neopets!
Other Neopian Activities
As I said before, just a few mini-games were converted to non-Flash formats. Being more exact, just 14 of them are available on the new Mobile-Friendly website:
Almost all Neopians do what are called "Dailies": fast and free activities that can be done once per day that award interesting rewards like Neopoints, Avatar, and Rare Items. Neopets has dozens of Dailies to be done, ranging from collecting free food from a Giant Omelette to telling a joke to the King and see if he gives you an expensive book!
Another very popular activity (that I love to do!) is "Restocking". There are hundreds of NPC Stores on the game (like the Haunted Weaponry, the Neovian Printing Pess, and the Uni's Clothing Shop). These shops sell thousands of items: a few of them are worthless and very common; a few of them are incredibly expensive and worth millions of Neopoints.
NPC Shops restock their items randomly, so no one knows when they'll be selling that rare item. That's what Restocking is: players keeping an eye on NPC Shops, trying to get rare items (both to use themselves, or to sell to other players).
Kauvara's Magic Shop is the most competitive shop to Restock in the entire Neopets, as it sells Morphing Potions. These potions are usually gone after 1 or 2 seconds, as there are literally dozens of players refreshing the page every second in order to buy these highly-coveted potions!
Restocking is very fun and profitable to do, especially if you join a community of Restockers (there are a few on Discord and Reddit), so everyone is looking across a huge array of different shops.
Thanks for reading this post, and until next time!
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