You might think of Neopets as nothing more than an Internet-based Tamagotchi—a ‘90s-era web page that
allowed users to care for pixelated penguins and dragons. But what if I told you that it trained
a generation of 13-year-olds to become skilled computer coders? Or that it broke new ground
in social networking before MySpace, and even before Facebook was a gleam in Mark Zuckerberg's
metaverse? That these digital creatures taught an entire generation of kids to be computer-savvy and
even got them well-versed in the stock market? And that part of its success was due to Scientology?
Well, that’s what I’m telling you, and yes, I can explain. It’s the story of Neopets,
featuring a cameo by Xenu, and it’s next on this installment of Throwback.
Welcome to the show where we take a look back at some of the most influential pop culture
stories and events you may remember from your childhood. I’m Erin McCarthy, and in this case,
I’m not too sure people even realize just how influential our subject for this video really was.
Neopets was the trojan horse of early websites, a sneaky and seemingly simplistic interactive
pet simulation that wound up becoming something much, much bigger. It was
like Tamagotchi meets Wall Street. But to understand how Neopets made such an impact,
we need to first take a look back at the primitive wasteland that was the internet of 1999.
By the end of the 1990s, personal computers were in roughly 50 percent of households and
people were getting accustomed to the idea of the internet as a valuable resource.
Yahoo was the premiere search engine; Google was still in beta testing. Enterprising users
were building their own websites on Geocities or pouring their hearts out on LiveJournal,
probably while listening to “All Star” by Smash Mouth and wearing a Gap hoodie.
There were only about 8 million teenagers using the internet at the time,
but despite that relatively low number, Adam Powell and Donna Williams thought they were
being underserved by the internet’s paltry interactive offerings. Their focus was on
building a platform for university students that might net them some income from banner ads.
Adam was a capable programmer who was designing ads for his father’s hot water bottle business.
Donna had studied sculpture and graphic design. Adam took note of Pokémon,
that trading card and video game sensation, and had an idea. Why not do something similar on the
web? The result was Neopets, a virtual pet utopia where visitors could build different cyber pets,
customizing their gender, color, and breed. Options ranged from your average
housecat to mythical creatures like dragons. Like Tamagotchi, the popular handheld game that
had recently come out, users had to care for their digital dependents by feeding them and playing
with them. Unlike Tamagotchi, Neopets wouldn’t drop dead from neglect. Plus, these hybrid
animals—with names like Nimmo, JubJub, Korbat, and Grarrl were colorful and well-rendered compared to
the digital handheld pets. Adam and Donna hoped that people would keep returning to the Neopets
site to care for their quirky animals and get exposed to some advertising while doing it.
But this wasn’t just an in-browser version of Tamagotchi. Adam and Donna
built an infrastructure around the pets that made everything feel more real. Users were
dubbed Neopians. The characters could take up residence in the Flash-animated world of Neopia,
living in different areas that were divided up like amusement park locations with names
like Mystery Island and Terror Mountain. The game even had its own newspaper,
The Neopian Times, that had everything from cartoons to editorials about the Neopia economy.
Yes—an economy. There were no free rides in Neopia. If you owned a Neopet, you had to play
games to earn credits, known as Neopoints. The games resembled staples like solitaire,
Minesweeper, Tetris, and even Whac-a-Mole. Neopoints could be redeemed for food,
pet costumes, toys, and tiny pet homes. You could even buy pets for your Neopets,
which were called petpets, and pets for those pets, which were
petpetpets. Some may have found it disgustingly cute, but if you’re into digital pet ownership,
cute is right where Adam and Donna wanted to be. Once they built up an impressive stash of digital
currency, users could humble-brag about their virtual wealth with other users.
They could also join guilds, which is what Neopets called sub-groups for fans of different television
shows, movies, books, and music. Logging in didn’t mean you had to talk about your pets. You could
also talk about Dawson’s Creek, or how much you loved Jar-Jar Binks in Star Wars: Episode One.
Neopets took off quickly. Neopets only offered nine pets when it launched in November, 1999,
but it took off quickly: soon, more than 500 people a day were signing up.That was
pretty good for 1999. Then traffic started to double every week. Adam and Donna saw potential
for Neopets to grow, but they were more content creators than businesspeople. They needed someone
to take Neopets to the next level. What they got was—scientology.
The early success of Neopets caught the attention of Doug Dohring, the founder
of the Dohring Company, a market research firm. Dohring and his partners bought the site, freeing
up Adam and Donna to focus on the creative side while Dohring concentrated on a business model.
Dohring happened to be a member of the Church of Scientology,
the controversial religious organization. It undoubtedly had an influence on Neopets.
Eventually, four of the six members of Neopets’ executive team were scientologists. Dohring used
what Scientology calls Org Board, a business model that splits key focus areas like communications,
production, and public relations into different umbrellas. And yes, this is what most businesses
do, but the Org Board version was said to have been adapted from one used by a galactic
civilization for 80 trillion years. The finer details of Org Board are a
closely-guarded secret. But Dohring made use of some of its practices, including asking
potential employees which straight line on a page seemed, quote, “friendlier.” Dohring even voiced
a desire to post scientology literature on the site, an idea that Adam and Donna,
who are not members of the church, shut that down. They didn’t want Neopets to be denominational.
There was another aspect to Neopets that caused some controversy. Neopets helped pioneer something
called immersive advertising, a phrase they later trademarked. Instead of a banner ad,
like Adam and Donna had pursued, players in the game would be subjected to in-world advertising.
A Neopet might encounter a breakfast cereal character like the Trix rabbit, or places might be
modeled after an advertising sponsor like Cartoon Network or McDonald’s. Gotta brush? They could
grab some digital Crest toothpaste. If a pet was thirsty, their owner could buy a Capri Sun for it.
And according to a Harvard Business School paper, during one campaign children commented things like
“When I saw Capri Sun on the site I had my mom go buy some so I could drink it with my pet.” Pretty
soon Lego, Frito-Lay, and Disney were popping up on the site. It was an early example of internet
product placement, and many users probably had no idea they were in the middle of an advertisement.
Consumer advocates like Ralph Nader argued that it was sneaky to market products to kids
in the middle of a game without some kind of disclosure. And, to be fair,
having kids earn Neopoints by watching commercials for Lucky Charms is kind of off-putting.
Some parents were also displeased to learn that kids could earn—or lose—Neopoints by
playing casino games like roulette or blackjack. In response, the site mandated players of those
games had to be 13 or older. You know, the average age of your typical casino visitor.
Whatever the merits or ethics of advertising or child gambling,
Neopets was quickly becoming about something much more than toothpaste.
Something Adam and Donna hadn’t anticipated. It was turning into a learning experience.
By 2005, Neopets was poised for another big breakthrough. It had registered an astounding
25 million users worldwide and was garnering over 2.2 billion page views monthly. That’s almost as
much as The New York Times gets today. Users spent an average of six hours and 15 minutes on the site
every month. Entertainment giant Viacom, which owned CBS and Nickelodeon, purchased the site from
Adam, Donna, and Doug Dohring for $160 million. But while Viacom technically owned the virtual
community, its real caretakers were the users themselves. And in order to really contribute to
this community, you had to have some skills beyond just figuring out how to access the internet.
A user’s Neopets page was like a profile page that was viewable by others. Users didn’t have
to settle for the standard template, though. With some basic HTML skills, they could customize it.
Having a more distinctive landing page gave users incentive to learn some basic coding skills they
might not otherwise have been motivated to discover. Some players would even offer to
build out web pages for other users in exchange for Neopoints. They were Neopian contractors.
The other edutainment aspect to Neopets was in its digital currency. The site had NEODAQ,
a take-off of the NASDAQ stock market that updated the economy of Neopia in almost real time.
Users could even invest their Neopoints in fake companies inside of the game and then watch as
their fortunes grew or were wiped out by a sudden market shift. If you thought Balthazar’s Faerie
Bottling Inc would rise in value, you could take a chance and maybe experience something usually
reserved only for adults—total financial ruin. One player, Neelou Etesami, told The Ringer:
“As a fifth-grader, I had set up extensive spreadsheets in Excel to track Neodaq stock
market prices daily so that I could pick up on stock patterns, and buy low,
sell high. … I ended up becoming a neomillionaire fairly quickly this way, and my friends saw me as
some sort of neopoint baron.” In fifth grade I was
dissecting owl pellets, so ... The more items a virtual store sold,
the better its stock price would get. Some Neopets users figured this out and then collaborated on
buying items to drive stock prices up. Young adults would be trading stock tips in the
same forums where kids would be role-playing their favorite animal characters in a forest.
Neopets wasn’t above introducing some artificial market fluctuations to keep things interesting,
either. When Enron collapsed, Neopets thought it would be fun to bankrupt a few
similar digital companies in the game. Remember, this was the early 2000s,
and Tamagotchi didn’t allow for much more than cleaning up digital pet droppings.
Neopets imparting coding skills and stock market savvy was extremely cutting edge.
Eighty percent of Neopets users were under 18. About 40 percent were under 13. That
meant a lot of kids were getting acclimated to weathering stock market storms in the hopes of
becoming neomillionaires. Neopets had something no social network really had before—an economy.
And this could sometimes translate into actual money. A player named Claire Hummel applied for
a real job with Neopets doing digital art. She was hired and spent seven summers working for
the company. What Neopets didn’t know was that Hummel applied when she was just 14 years old,
a fairly precocious age to be getting hired by a big tech company. Hey,
if a kid is old enough to gamble on Neopets blackjack, she’s old enough to earn a paycheck.
Immersive advertising aside, Neopets was one of the safer online hubs of its era.
And it also tried to maximize its profits in a variety of ways.
Early on, Doug Dohring proclaimed Neopets could be something like Marvel or Disney, with a rich
mythology that could be transported into other venues. A planned feature film never materialized,
but there were plenty of other ways for Neopets to infiltrate impressionable young minds.
In 2006, General Mills introduced Neopets Islandberry Crunch, a fruity cereal that
resembled Trix and was based on an object from the game. The box featured a species known as kougra,
a blue-haired tiger kind of thing. Inside was a prize—a Neopets trading card.
Speaking of trading cards—Neopets got their own tabletop card game in 2003 courtesy of Wizards
of the Coast, the company behind Magic: The Gathering. The Neopets were pitted in
contests involving strength, agility, magic, and intelligence. The series didn’t really catch on,
though, and was discontinued in 2006. Which probably explains
why the cards were free in cereal boxes. You could also pick up Neopets: The Official
Magazine, a bimonthly publication. The first issue in 2003 featured a pretty salacious-looking fairy
on the cover. Inside were games and product checklists to keep track of your virtual
Neopets merchandise. It ran through 2008. In 2008, Jakks Pacific released a line
of plush Neopets toys. You could get them exclusively at Target, but no one got into
a Beanie Babies-style melee over them. While all these ancillary products were fun,
none of them made much of an impact. Neopets really lived online, where users could experience
a fully immersive world. The concept seemed poised to become a permanent fixture on the internet.
Yet you’re probably not caring for a four-legged creature named Poogle currently.
So what happened? By 2011, Neopets had reached
a staggering 1 trillion cumulative page views. But as the internet grew, visitors had more and more
places to interact. The customization of Neopets became less and less of a novelty when compared
to a Facebook profile. And that cool virtual economy? It also had some not-so-cool virtual
inflation that made in-game items too expensive for a lot of players. With so much traffic, there
was simply too much virtual cash floating around. Neopets was sold in 2014 to an educational company
named JumpStart. But the conversion was a little bumpy, and the site developed some defects
and suffered a data breach affecting 70 million users. By 2016, some described the site as a kind
of ghost town. The pets were abandoned, with users visiting the site less and less often. Pretty
soon, only a few thousand people were coming on a regular basis to take care of their animals.
When JumpStart was acquired by a company named NetDragon in 2017,
Neopets started to show some signs of life. New administrators began updating the site’s
blogs and creating events for players to get involved with. That led to a surge
of interest in people who had forgotten they even had a Neopets account. In a lot of cases,
their digital pets were still there, waiting for them—alive and kicking and really, really hungry.
At last count, more than 283 million Neopets populate the site, and it has around 100,000
daily active users. While a far cry from their heyday, Neopets are nowhere near extinct.
So why did Neopets thrive? On one level, it had that Tamagotchi appeal—taking care of a
digital pet was addictive. But Neopets had a lot more going on. Community members got
lessons in coding and finance without even really realizing it—at least, not until they
discovered they had been building skills that led them into programming or money management.
Neopets may be the only computer game that hid its edutainment value almost completely. This wasn’t
The Oregon Trail, and you didn’t have to play it in computer class at school. Neopets built
some very grown-up ideas into a very simplistic interface. Remember 14-year-old digital artist
Claire Hummel? She ended up working for Xbox, and is now with the video game company Valve.
It was also a training ground for the internet of today. Communities with specific interests?
Neopets had it. Digital currency? They did it. Trolls, memes, fan art? It
was all there. Neopets helped acclimate people to having virtual identities that coexisted with
real life. Vox associate identities editor Allegra Frank once wrote that Neopets helped her with some
disruptive social anxiety. She could bond with classmates over their Neopets and carry their
friendships to and from the digital community. Now Neopets are taking a page from the internet
of today, offering NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, as a way of reviving interest.
Will it work? Who knows! But either way, the Neopets legacy as a pioneering
site that offered way more than virtual cats is already secured.
I’m Erin McCarthy. Thanks for watching. If you had a Neopet,
leave a description in the comments. And maybe log back in to feed it. We’ll see you next time.