Having grown up in the '90s, gaming on PC was nothing like it is today. I can still recall the excitement on my dad's face when he brought home our second family computer, excitedly telling me about the 1GB of storage space we'd now have. A whole Gig! We'd never fill that up! That was also the first computer we ever took online, and back in those early glory days when whatever was on AOL made up the bulk of my online experience, there were still a few times I'd stray from the AOL message board and chatrooms and take trepid step into the dreaded URL bar, typing in a secret code starting with www that I'd read in a book. (Yes, I used to find websites through books; it as a different time). I don't know that you could truly consider them all games by today's standard — they were more like little animated communities where minigames were present, but community and website exploration made up a good deal of the action.
So when I saw our own Jack Coleman stepping outside the box to revisit his childhood love for Wizard 101 a while back, it made me nostalgic for a simpler time when I was but a bored and curious teen on the Internet (not like that, ya pervs. Get your minds out of the gutter). In the last couple of weeks, I've re-embraced my childhood love of Neopets, a splendiferous online virtual pet playground of games and merriment launched in 1999. To my surprise, I've discovered that you're still free to explore Neopets today, though it's safe to say it's not quite the online tour-de-force it once was.
Oh, and Neopets was dependent on Flash, and, well, Flash is dead, with the end result being that the site doesn't function the way that it should. Choose-your-own-adveture-style stories are abruptly cut off as soon as a movie is encountered, and about 80 percent of the minigames scattered throughout the site crash as soon as I click the start button. I found out through Reddit that you can get everything (or almost everything) to function properly if you download and install an off-the-mainstram web browser that still supports flash, but I'm already middle-aged and stalking around a website designed for kids. Installing a special web browser just to hang around the Neopets community? That feels like the sort of thing that'd get me put on a government watchlist — and I think I'm in the majority of people who aren't going to add an extra Internet browser for the sake of one nostalgic website — so I think I'll just keep poking around in good ol' Chrome.
The site is still filled with brightly-colored maps beckoning me into a wonderful array of shops and games and other attractions. There's the dual medieval-themed kingdoms of Brightvale and Meridell, the under-the-sea realm of Maraqua, the orbital Virtupets Space Station, and more than a dozen others. It's like that feeling you get on a glorious summer morning when your parents have driven you out to an amusement park; a place where enjoyment is king, and you can really just run wild and be a kid.
But the more and more I clicked around this world of wonder and merriment, the more it lost that magical glow, and it started to feel like those eerie photo essays of abandoned theme parks, where nature has reclaimed the empty walkways and rides sit idly in a dilapidated state of inoperable decay. Most of the games scattered throughout the map are inaccessible by conventional means (more on that later), simply popping up a plugin error whenever I try to play.
You're still allowed to spend your hard-won Neopoints on things like scratch cards, but good luck actually trying to scratch them off and cash them in once the irritatingly smiling shopkeepers have taken your virtual currency. Even the tutorial just displays an endless screen of blank white, and creating a NeoHome, one of the boxes on my new user checklist, is staying permanently unchecked, as the website lets me pick what region of the virtual world I'd like to live in but won't let me close on the deal. To their credit, the devs had announced a long time ago that they'd been working on porting the game to mobile, but it's been that way for years and the whole thing's still in a semi-broken beta state on my phone too.
Despite feeling like some sort of spiritually tortuous purgatory where everything that you used to love is right in front of you and you just can't touch it, the NeoBoards forums are still packed to the Flotsam gills with a dedicated player base. And to make me feel less like an old creeper on a website designed with kids in mind, it kindly displays the number of months since each user that posts there has had an account, letting me know that, yes, there are plenty of players who have been around for 200+ months, maintaining that sweet virtual escape from their own days of youth.
There's still some charming stuff here. You can find a few card games that still work scattered throughout Neopia, and there's a handy games page that lists 14 other games that are currently still functioning. Just don't play for too long in one session, because most of them seem to randomly change your score to NAN or decide after a while that you don't get your NeoPoints rewards because you're a "suspicious user." I mean, I already admitted to being too old to be here, but you don't have to make me feel bad about it; this ain't Chuck E. Cheese!
My old favorite, the hot potato-like Gormball, is sadly unavailable, but there's still some mindless, lighthearted fun to be had with the games that are fully functional, like Hasee Bounce, in which you control two adorable little something-or-others as they catapult each other on a seesaw to catch doughnut-fruits, culminating in either a scene of them happily munching on their treasures or sobbing their pwecious widdle eyes out.
And of course, the core of the game — the feeding, grooming, and training of virtual pets that was a defining feature of '90s kids everywhere — is still intact. It really doesn't matter what you feed them, but there's a lot of fun to be had just stocking up on food for your little buds, from berry picking at Meridell Farms to grabbing a slice on the massive omelette on Tyranian Plateau. The arena still makes no sense to me, but reflecting on it, I don't think it made sense to teenage me either, like it was tacked on to cash in on the Pokemon hype and still hasn't been developed in the nearly two-and-a-half decades that it's been around.
All in all, it's been a nice little nostalgic visit to Neopia, but I don't think I'll be settling down here — and not just because my pedestrian, mainstream web browser won't let me create a NeoHome. My old account and pets are gone, lost to the ages among website maintenance and increased security measures of the past. Neopets now belongs to the diehards; the people who've stayed around through the thick and thin of things. In my hubris, I mistakenly thought I'd grown too cool for it, and it passed me by.
But that doesn't mean I won't be popping in every few days — my Korbat and Grundo would be starving otherwise — and if you've ever been a Neopets player, I'd encourage you to pop in and have a look around too. And while the mobile-friendly version seems entirely stalled out, Neopets Metaverse released in alpha last fall, and if they can get all the classic stuff working for the mainstream again, I'd happily challenge you to a game of Gormball.