What was Neopets?

[Gmano]

I see people talk about how social games are huge and new and all that... but it occurs to me; neopets launched a decade ago, and has quite the following at its peak. Granted neopets did significantly less micro transactions, but otherwise it was very similar, grind a few locations for cash and items to level your pet. Superficially easy, but incredibly time consuming, deep and impossibly hard to master...

So how can we say we let these games take us by surprise?

 

[AvsJoe]

Despite being the same age as the target audience, I wasn't keen on the Neopets thing. I had a Tamagatchi for a while and hated the thing and Neopets reminded me of it. I remember going to the site and creating a profile but I don't remember if I made my own pet.

 

[AlexGoBoom]

I remember really hating neopets a lot mostly because of the massive amounts of grinding involved, flash games were alright

 

[WestMountain]

I found out that the Slot Machines were real goldmines, you could just use them an hour and make your money 100x bigger , but then I noticed how bad the game was and how much grinding there were, so then I stopped playing it :]

 

[BobisOnlyBob]

Neopets was more a collection of traditional games (mostly Flash games) joined together by a large 'mons'/pet game (see: Pokemon, Digimon, Tamagotchi). Investing in it at all took time and effort; it was a children's game, but that doesn't mean it was a casual game.

Social? Barely. It had a forum bolted to the whole affair, but actually linking together and influencing other players directly, like in say, Farmville or other Zynga games, was actually a pain in the ass.

 

[ProfessorLayton]

Oh wow the nostalgia... Would you believe me if I told you that Neopets taught me how to code in HTML? When I was in fourth grade? I loved Neopets so much. I would constantly go around collecting avatars and playing flash games. I don't care what anyone says, Neopets was awesome and I wish there were more games like it. Sure there was a lot of grind for little reward, but it was so addicting.

 

[Vancleef]

I remember playing neopets in third grade or something. It was pretty fun

I think I had a dolphin-thingy (I belive they were called 'Flotsam') and a blue bear...


The notstalgia...

 

[AlexGoBoom]

remember this guy's game?

Spoiler

and how it was ruined?

Spoiler: Improvement?