On the Announcement of Neopet's Return

Posted 2023-08-08

Neopets was, or is, a virtual pet website, where one could create a number of pets which they then feed, play with, and otherwise care for. It has flash games and sundry other distractions to keep your bored children occupied while you tend to other matters.

But it was so much more than that. It was a forum; it was a fansite; it was a microblogging platform; it was a webhost; it was a gambling den; it was a comic series; it was a strange center of all the things that made the old internet strange and exciting, not the least of which the fact that the experience wasn't bounded to a singular media, or limited by the restrictions of some monolithic Content Engine whose nebulous algorithm demands, above all else, readily-digestible conformity.

In many ways, I attribute a lot of the way my life has unfolded to Neopets. Most notably in its user profiles and Pet Pages - features which gave you unlimited power to customize, personalize, invent, and express yourself, powered by nothing but a text field whatever HTML had to give you. Of course, I wanted my profile to look cool and unique - I wanted my pets to have great landing pages. So I checked out primitive books on HTML from the library, browsed a then-reliable Google for instructions on how to change a scroll bar's color or get images in a certain order. I quickly learned I could do more than merely make neat landing pages, I could make anything with enough time and dedication. So I dedicated time. And now I'm a full-stack developer.