The Growth of Neopets and the Future of Virtual Pet Sites
If you ask someone about Neopets, there is a big chance they will know exactly what you’re talking about. Neopets is a virtual pet site that launched on November 15, 1999, created by Adam and Donna Powell. Many people, including myself, have grown with the site and have watched it as it changed as time continued to pass to keep up with the ever evolving internet.
As you can see from the above pictures, the overall layout of Neopets has changed pretty drastically. But that hasn’t stopped most users from playing, including myself.
In the beginning, Neopets was a site to keep university students entertained. It contained pictures of actual people as pets, and the art left a lot to be desired. Fortunately, the website spread and found sponsors to keep it up and running, as it was quickly approaching over 600,000 page views a day merely by word of mouth. As time passed, they acquired more artists to give all the pets a face lift, as well as to add new pets to the site. These pets were all available in the same four basic colors — red, blue, yellow, and green. Paintbrushes were used (and still are) to change the color of a pet, some to just another basic color such as orange or purple, to drastic chances such as turning the pet into a baby, Faerie, or Tyrannian.
After Neopets was purchased by Viacom in 2005, things started to change. The website got it’s face lift and all of the pets were recreated with static poses that allowed for customization. Now, even though a user could paint their pet Tyrannian, the pose would still stay the same, just adding clothing and minor aesthetic changes to the pet. Fortunately for pets created before this change, users had the option of keeping the old art, losing the ability to customize their Neopet for the sake of reminiscing. Overall, this change upset a lot of long time users who had yet to acquire their dream pet and now had to get something that lacked the individuality like the old art.
Eventually, many players accepted this change and were excited to customize their pets. New clothes and items are released almost daily, with some restricted to one species, but most created for use on all of them. Today, baby neopets are not allowed to be customized with items that would go on their bodies, but can have backgrounds as well as decorative items around them. Every neopet can now have their own personality through clothing and such! :)
Neocash was also introduced to the website as another way for the site to make money away from advertisements. This other form of currency allowed users to buy different exclusive items from a special shop that were usually fancier clothing items for customization. Other things could be purchased such as chances on a random item game or a fortune cookie to acquire Faerie Quests or extra zaps at the elusive Lab Ray.
In 2014, Neopets was purchased by Knowledge Adventure Inc. from Viacom. This server move led to the site acquiring heaps of glitches and lag, disappointing players. On a weekend in June of 2015, the profanity filter on the site glitched which led to a flood of adult content and language on the site, breaking the site’s child-friendly image.
Through all of these challenges, the site continues to be overwhelmingly successful with many players spending multiple hours on the site daily as well as weekly. New users continue to join, inspiring generations of artist and storytellers as they venture to create stories with their pets. Neopets was the kickstarter for a lot of successful future pet sites of all different varieties, such as Subeta, Wajas, Lioden, and Aywas, as well as many others. These other pet sites have yet to reach the status of their predecessors but focus more on customization and community. Each has their own story to tell, and hopefully will continue to be successful.
