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The history of Neopets includes more Scientology, gambling, and internet-changing innovation that you probably realized.
Throwback is a series from Mental Floss where we take a deep dive into some of the most fascinating stories behind the toys, trends, and events you might remember from your childhood. This episode is all Neopets, the surprisingly influential Web 2.0 staple.
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The History of Neopets | Mental Floss
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0:00
You might think of Neopets as nothing more than an internet-based Tamagotchi, a 90s-era
0:05
web page that allowed users to care for pixelated penguins and dragons
0:08
But what if I told you that it trained a generation of 13-year-olds to become skilled computer
0:12
programmers, or that it broke new ground in social networking before MySpace and before
0:17
Facebook was even a gleam in Mark Zuckerberg's metaverse? That these digital creatures taught an entire generation of kids to be computer-savvy and
0:23
even got them well-versed in the stock market? And that part of its success was due to Scientology
0:28
It's the story of Neopets, featuring a cameo by Xenu, and it's next on this installment of Throwback
0:40
Welcome to the show where we take a look back at some of the most influential pop culture stories and events that you might remember from your childhood
0:46
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
0:52
Neo Pets was the Trojan horse of early websites, a sneaky and seemingly simplistic interactive pet simulation that wound up becoming something much, much bigger
1:01
It was like Tamagotchi meets Wall Street. But to understand how Neo Pets made such a big impact, we need to first take a look back at the primitive wasteland that was the Internet of 1999
1:15
By the end of the 1990s, personal computers were in roughly 50% of households
1:19
and people were getting accustomed to the idea of the internet as a valuable resource
1:23
Yahoo was the premier search engine. Google was still in beta testing. Enterprising users were building their own websites on Geocities
1:29
or pouring their hearts out on LiveJournal, probably while listening to All Star by Smash Mouth and wearing a Gap hoodie
1:35
I happen to think All Star by Smash Mouth is underrated. There were only about 8 million teenagers using the internet at the time
1:42
but despite that relatively low number, Adam Powell and Donna Williams thought they were being underserved
1:47
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
1:54
Adam was a capable programmer who was designing ads for his father's hot water bottle business
1:59
Donna had studied sculpture and graphic design. Adam took note of Pokemon, that trading card and video game sensation, and had an idea
2:06
Why not do something similar on the web? The result was Neopets, a virtual pet utopia where visitors could build different cyberpets
2:13
customizing their gender, color, and breed. options ranged from your average house cat to mythical creatures like dragons like tamagotchi
2:20
the popular handheld game that had recently come out users had to care for their digital
2:24
dependence by feeding them and playing with them unlike tamagotchi neopets wouldn't drop dead from
2:29
neglect plus these hybrid animals with names like nimmo jub jub corbat and growl were colorful and
2:35
well rendered compared to the digital handheld pets adam and donna hoped that people would keep
2:40
returning to the neopets site to care for their quirky animals and get exposed to some advertising
2:45
while doing it. But this wasn't just an in-browser version of Tamagotchi
2:49
Adam and Donna built an infrastructure around the pets that made everything feel more real
2:53
Users were dubbed Neopians. The characters would take up residence in the flash animated world of
2:58
Neopia, living in different areas that were divided up like amusement park locations
3:02
with names like Mystery Island and Terror Mountain. The game even had its own newspaper
3:07
the Neopian Times, that had everything from cartoons to editorials about the Neopia economy
3:12
Yes, an economy. If you owned a Neopet, you had to play games to earn credits, known as
3:17
Neopoints. The games resembled staples like Solitaire, Minesweeper, Tetris, and even Whack-a-Mole
3:22
Neopoints could be redeemed for food, pet costumes, toys, and tiny pet homes. You could
3:27
even buy pets for your Neopets which were called Pet Pets and pets for those pets which were pet pet pets Some may have found it disgustingly cute but if you into digital pet ownership
3:38
cute is right where Adam and Donna wanted to be. Once they built up an impressive stash of digital
3:43
currency, users could humblebrag about their virtual wealth with other users. They could
3:48
also join guilds, which is what neopets called subgroups for fans of different television shows
3:53
movies, books, and music. Logging in didn't mean you had to talk about your pets
3:57
You could also talk about Dawson's Creek, or how much you love Jar Jar Binks in Star Wars Episode 1
4:02
Neopets only offered nine pets when it launched in November 1999, but it took off quickly
4:07
Soon more than 500 people a day were signing up. That was pretty good for 1999
4:12
Then traffic started to double every week. Adam and Donna saw potential for Neopets to grow, but they were more content creators than business people
4:20
They needed someone to take Neopets to the next level. What they got was Scientology
4:27
The early success of Neopets caught the attention of Doug Doering, the founder of the Doering Company, a marketing research firm
4:36
Doering and his partners bought the site, freeing up Adam and Donna to focus on the creative side
4:40
while Doering concentrated on a business model. Doering happened to be a member of the Church of Scientology
4:46
the controversial religious organization. It undoubtedly had an influence on Neopets. Eventually, four of the six members of Neopets' executive team were Scientologists
4:54
Doering used what Scientology calls Orgboard, a business model that splits key focus areas
5:00
like communications, production, and public relations into different umbrellas. And yes, this is what most businesses do, but the Orgboard version was said to have been
5:07
adapted from one used by a galactic civilization for 80 trillion years
5:11
The finer details of Orgboard are a closely guarded secret, but Doering made use of some
5:16
of its practices, including asking potential employees which straight line on a page seemed
5:20
quote, friendlier. Doering even voiced a desire to post Scientology literature on the site, an idea that Adam and
5:27
Donna, who are not members of the church, shut down. They didn't want Neopets to be denominational
5:33
There was another aspect to Neopets that caused some controversy. Neopets helped pioneer something called immersive advertising, a phrase they later trademarked
5:41
Instead of a banner ad like Adam and Donna had pursued, players in the game would be subjected
5:46
to in-world advertising. A Neopet might encounter a breakfast cereal character like the Trix rabbit
5:50
where places might be modeled after an advertising sponsor like Cartoon Network or McDonald's
5:56
Got a brush? They could grab some digital Crest toothpaste. If a pet was thirsty, their owner could buy a Capri Sun for it
6:03
And according to a Harvard Business School paper, during one campaign, children commented things like
6:08
When I saw Capri Sun on the site, I had my mom go buy some so I could drink it with my pet
6:12
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
6:19
they were in the middle of an advertisement. Consumer advocates like Ralph Nader argued that
6:23
it was sneaky to market products to kids in the middle of a game without some kind of disclosure
6:28
And to be fair, having kids earn Neo points by watching commercials for Lucky Charms is kind of
6:32
off-putting. But the people behind Neopets countered that no kid was forced into buying
6:36
sponsored products or playing sponsored games. Some parents were also displeased to learn that
6:40
kids could earn, or lose, Neo points by playing casino games like roulette or blackjack. In
6:46
In response, the site mandated players of those games had to be 13 or older
6:50
You know, the average age of your typical casino visitor. Whatever the merits or ethics of advertising or child gambling, Neopets was quickly becoming
6:58
about something much more than toothpaste. Something Adam and Donna hadn anticipated It was turning into a learning experience By 2005 Neopets was poised for another big breakthrough It had registered an astounding
7:15
25 million users worldwide and was garnering over 2.2 billion page views monthly. That's
7:22
almost as much as the New York Times gets today. Entertainment giant Viacom, which owned CBS and
7:27
Nickelodeon, purchased the site from Adam, Donna, and Doug Doring for $160 million
7:32
But while Viacom technically owned the virtual community, its real caretakers were the users
7:37
themselves. And in order to really contribute to this community, you had to have some skills
7:42
beyond just figuring out how to access the internet. A user's Neopets page was like a
7:46
profile page that was viewable by others. Users didn't have to settle for the standard template
7:51
though. With some basic HTML skills, they could customize it. Having a more distinctive landing
7:56
page gave users incentive to learn some basic coding skills they might not otherwise have
8:00
been motivated to discover. Some players would even offer to build out web pages for other users
8:04
in exchange for Neopoints. They were Neopian contractors. The other edutainment aspect to
8:10
Neopets was in its digital currency. The site had Neodac, a takeoff of the NASDAQ stock market that
8:16
updated the economy of Neopia in almost real-time. Users could even invest their Neopoints and fake
8:21
companies inside of the game, and then watch as their fortunes grew or were wiped out by
8:26
a sudden market shift. If you thought Balthazar's fairy bottling ink would rise in value, you could take a
8:31
chance and maybe experience something usually reserved only for adults—total financial ruin
8:37
One player, Nilou Edesamy, told The Ringer, As a fifth grader, I had set up extensive spreadsheets in Excel to track NEO DAC stock
8:43
market prices daily so that I could pick up on stock patterns and buy low, sell high
8:47
I ended up becoming a Neo millionaire fairly quickly this way. And my friend saw me as some sort of Neo point baron
8:53
In fifth grade, I was dissecting owl pellets, so… The more items a virtual store sold, the better its stock price would get
9:00
Some Neopets users figured this out and then collaborated on buying items to drive stock
9:04
prices up. Young adults would be trading stock tips in the same forums where kids would be roleplaying
9:09
their favorite animal characters in a forest. Neopets wasn't above introducing some artificial market fluctuations to keep things interesting, either
9:17
collapsed, Neopets thought it would be fun to bankrupt a few similar digital companies
9:21
in the game. Remember, this was the early 2000s, and Tamagotchi didn't allow for much
9:26
more than cleaning up digital pet droppings. Neopets imparting coding skills and stock
9:30
market savvy was extremely cutting edge. 80% of Neopets users were under 18. About 40
9:37
were under 13. That meant a lot of kids were getting acclimated to weathering stock market
9:41
storms in the hopes of becoming neomillionaires. Neopets had something no social network really
9:45
had before. An economy. And this could sometimes translate into actual money. A player named Claire
9:51
Hummel applied for a real job with Neopets doing digital art. She was hired and spent seven summers
9:57
working for the company. What Neopets didn't know was that Hummel applied when she was just 14 years
10:02
old, a fairly precocious age to be getting hired by a big tech company. Hey, if a kid is old enough
10:07
to gamble on Neopets Blackjack, she's old enough to earn a paycheck. With tens of millions of users
10:12
in a sprawling community, Neopets could seemingly do no wrong. Immersive advertising aside, Neopets was one of the safer online hubs of its era
10:20
and it also tried to maximize its profits in a variety of ways
10:28
Early on, Doug Dorig proclaimed Neopets could be something like Marvel or Disney
10:32
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
10:44
Island Berry Crunch, a fruity cereal that resembled tricks and was based on an object
10:49
from the game. Inside was a prize, a Neopets trading card. Speaking of trading cards
10:54
Neopets got their own tabletop card game in 2003, courtesy of Wizards of the Coast
10:58
the company behind Magic the Gathering. The series didn't really catch on though, and was discontinued in 2006, which probably explains why the cards were free in cereal boxes
11:07
You could also pick up Neopets The Official Magazine, a bi-monthly publication. The first
11:12
issue in 2003 featured a pretty salacious-looking fairy on the cover. Inside were games and product
11:17
checklists to keep track of your virtual Neopets merchandise. In 2008, Jax Pacific released a line
11:23
of Neopets toys. You could get them exclusively at Target, but no one got into a Beanie Baby-style
11:28
melee over them. While all of these ancillary products were fun, none of them made much of an
11:33
impact. Neopets really lived online, where users could experience a fully immersive world
11:39
The concept seemed poised to become a permanent fixture on the internet. Yet you're probably not caring for a four-legged creature named Pugle currently
11:46
So what happened? By 2011, Neopets had reached a staggering 1 trillion cumulative page views
11:53
But as the internet grew, visitors had more and more places to interact
11:57
The customization of Neopets became less and less of a novelty when compared to a Facebook profile
12:02
Neopets was sold in 2014 to an educational company named Jumpstart, but the conversion was a little bumpy
12:08
and the site developed some defects and suffered a data breach affecting 70 million users
12:13
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
12:20
Pretty soon, only a few thousand people were coming on a regular basis to take care of their animals
12:24
When Jumpstart was acquired by a company named NetDragon in 2017, Neopets started to show some signs of life
12:30
New administrators began updating the site's blogs and creating events for players to get involved with
12:35
That led to a surge of interest in people who had forgotten they even had a Neopets account
12:40
In a lot of cases, their digital pets were still there, waiting for them. Alive and kicking and really, really hungry
12:46
At last count, more than 283 million Neopets populate the site, and it is around 100,000 daily active users
12:53
While a far cry from their heyday, Neopets are nowhere near extinct
12:58
So why did Neopets thrive? On one level, it had that Tamagotchi appeal
13:03
Taking care of a digital pet was addictive. But Neopets had a lot more going on
13:08
Community members got lessons in coding and finance without even really realizing it
13:12
At least not until they discovered they had been building skills that led them into programming or money management
13:17
Neopets may be the only computer game that hit its edutainment value almost completely
13:21
This wasn't the Oregon Trail, and you didn't have to play it in computer class at school
13:25
Neopets built some very grown-up ideas into a very simplistic interface. Remember 14-year-old digital artist Claire Hummel
13:33
She ended up working for Xbox and is now with the video game company Valve
13:37
It was also a training ground for the internet of today. Communities with specific interests
13:42
Neopets had it. Digital currency? They did it. Trolls? Memes? Fan art
13:47
It was all there. Now, Neopets are taking a page from the internet of today, offering NFTs or non-fungible tokens
13:54
as a way of reviving interest. Will it work? Who knows? But either way, Neopets Legacy as a pioneering site that offered way more than virtual cats
14:02
is already secured. I'm Erin McCarthy. Thanks for watching. If you had a Neopet, leave a description in the comments
14:09
And maybe log back in to feed it. We'll see you next time
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