Virtual pets, a stock market, and a fandom that learned HTML to decorate its shop. Lost most of its games when Flash died and was bought back by fans who had become adults with money.
There was a fortnight in 2005 when Neopets was the only thing anyone at my work talked about, and one of us printed something about it out. Printed. On paper. It was on the kitchen noticeboard for a year.
We used to argue about Neopets on a forum that no longer exists, run by a man whose name I never knew, and I would give a lot to read those threads again. The argument was better than anything I have read about it since.
Sighting, 16 January, a church noticeboard, hand-lettered. Neopets, used correctly, in full, with no visible irony. Nobody involved is under fifty.
Filed as evidence: a council recycling leaflet, 13 February. Neopets, with quotation marks around it, which is how an institution says it has heard of something.
The headnote is right but it undersells how ordinary this was at the time. Nobody using Neopets in 2005 thought of it as a thing with a name; it was just how you talked, and naming it is what started the clock.
I would add a line to the headnote: the first documented use in neopets.com, Adam Powell and Donna Williams is the earliest surviving one, not the first one. These things are always older than the oldest screenshot.
Wrote this one in 2020 and had to retract it in 2023. 3 years dead, then not. The record says “Died with Flash; revived by new owners, 2023” and the second half of that sentence is doing a great deal of work.
What does it mean? Write it the way you would say it out loud.
