Games like Turmac Roll and Hasee Chase are still popular as ever, and freebie dispensaries like the Money Tree and the Giant Omelette continue to satisfy the scroungers among all of us. The website’s canary yellow banner with decorative stars still graces the homepage, while its array of pets (Jub Jub the pom pom, Bruce the penguin, Chia the anthropomorphic eggplant) remain quaintly two dimensional. Wading back into Neopia more than a decade on since quitting the game, nothing seems to have really changed, at least on the face of it. Gone, but not forgotten, and probably cannibals by now. Over time, I started to log in less and less until one day, I just never went back, relegating my Kacheek (or was it a Lupe?) to the Neopets graveyard of time. This blissful routine went on for the next how many years before other adolescent interests (MSN, Bebo) entered the scene.
Neopets was a virtual safe haven for much of the site’s prepubescent user base who, if they were anything like me, would rush home after school, power up the family computer, connect to the dial-up internet, and get as much done as possible before getting kicked off because someone needed to use the landline phone. We remember the glory days of this internet phenomenon, but also: the hacking, the gambling, and the ‘Wall of Shame’.īefore Club Penguin, before Runescape, before Habbo Hotel and all those other simulated worlds of internet folklore, there was Neopets – a colourful universe full of animated creatures whose heyday harks back to the turn of the century. Next year will mark 20 years since Neopets materialised on the World Wide Web, and with most of its former user base now in their 20s and 30s, it seems the time is ripe for a nostalgic resurgence.
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