Neopets on Tuesday unveiled daring plans for the sport’s relaunch, centered round a brand new homepage that goes stay Thursday, and new video games and new plots beginning Tuesday.
“We wish to deliver Neopets again to its glory days,” the corporate mentioned in a weblog submit. The relaunch follows a change in possession and an inflow of $4 million raised from buyers earlier this yr, it mentioned.
Right here’s the way it labored: Select between an array of dewy-eyed, mythic Neopets to undertake as your individual. Discover the kaleidoscopic 2-D world of Neopia by means of the eyes of your pets, taking part in mini puzzles alongside the way in which. Furnish your 2000s-aesthetic Neohome. Nourish your pets by grabbing slices from an infinite omelet. Undertake pets to your Neopets, often called Petpets. You get the thought.
The crew behind ‘Neopets’ announce they’re underneath new management and promise a “new period” for the browser-based recreation.
Beginning July 20, a brand new model homepage shall be launched, serving as a unified web site for the whole lot Neopets-related. The crew additionally guarantees to restore website… pic.twitter.com/J84XrvYPM3
— Pop Crave (@PopCrave) July 18, 2023
The location has modified arms a number of occasions, with neighborhood numbers dwindling to 100,000 every day energetic customers in 2020, the yr Flash was discontinued, which brought on key options of the location to stop functioning. For the final decade, the location was working at a monetary loss, denying its builders the assets wanted to overtake the location and repair its mounting issues, the Neopets crew mentioned Tuesday.
Neopets’s rebrand, the crew mentioned, shall be loyal to the location’s origins. The web site’s operators will now deal with reviving the favored minigames that after relied on Flash to operate, and abandon plans to combine cryptocurrency or NFTs into the sport. Customers may even be launched to a brand new cellular recreation often called “World of Neopets,” the corporate mentioned, describing it as a brand new “social life-simulation recreation” that guarantees to allow you to “stay your best Neopian life from the attitude of a Neopet!”
“This magical neighborhood deserves to thrive, not simply survive. Due to our new management path and the recent supply of funding, it lastly can,” Neopets mentioned in its weblog submit, including that new builders and artists had been employed to repair points plaguing the location.
“The Neopets Staff is, for the primary time in over a decade, outfitted to make significant adjustments in pursuit of a Neopian renaissance,” it added.
Joseph Miller, a 25-year-old school scholar in Houston, has cared for shut to 2 dozen Neopets since adopting his first creature in 2007. “I used to be hooked ever since,” he mentioned in a phone interview Wednesday, whereas multitasking with Neopets on his browser.
He described himself as cautiously optimistic concerning the Neopets’ future, following the announcement: “There are a variety of crucial options which have been lengthy requested by the neighborhood. These should be addressed, but it surely wouldn’t require a radical revamp of the location.”
“It could be good if a lot of the website stays the identical,” he mentioned.
“I at all times like to think about Neopets as the unique social media platform.” The location, among the many first geared towards youthful individuals with an internet neighborhood discussion board for exchanging messages, preceded Myspace, Fb and Twitter by years.
The enchantment of Neopets, Miller argues, is how welcoming and real its neighborhood is — a far cry from many social media websites as we speak. “With loads of social media these days, lots of people are involved with politics and being on the precise crew,” Miller mentioned, whereas “with Neopets, persons are simply much more involved about expressing themselves.”
“It feels much more real,” he mentioned.
(Miller’s oldest surviving Neopet is a 4,077-day-old Eyrie named Baliscious, whom he adopted in 2012. However his favourite is Koboro, a 126-day-old grey-colored “Bori” with wings, resembling a mix of a butterfly, an armadillo and a deer. On Wednesday morning, Koboro was famished and in want of feeding.)
“The individuals who nonetheless caught round all these years, we’ve shaped like a small township … it feels very acquainted and nostalgic. It’s good,” he mentioned.
“I’m past excited,” one other energetic Neopets person, 32-year-old Alexandra Kane from New Orleans, mentioned of the relaunch in an electronic mail to The Publish.
Kane adopted her first Neopet when she was in center college, utilizing her native library pc. She has since gone on to take care of round 20 digital pets, she mentioned.
“Whereas Neopets is a recreation website with digital pets as [its] point of interest, I feel it’s true worth is a time capsule of the early 2000s and early web tradition,” she mentioned.
“It’s an actual snap shot of my youth and what the world was like on the time,” she mentioned. “I feel individuals nonetheless benefit from the nostalgia of the location and the lore that was created again within the day.”
