Eventually, a friend mentioned the site to Doug Dohring, chairman and CEO of the Dohring company, a market research firm.ĭohring immediately saw the potential of Neopets, and within about a month, offered to invest heavily in it. Within a couple of months, their traffic was doubling on a weekly basis. Williams and Powell posted their site up on a few pet message boards, and the idea seriously caught on. The pets at the beginning were crude and consisted mostly of pop culture references (one of the original pets was famously just a Photoshopped image of Bruce Forsythe), but the mechanics and gameplay were all there. And if you didn’t keep coming back, your pet would get mad or upset.
Users could create these virtual pets and feed them or play with them. It was extremely rough around the edges, but the core of the idea remained the same. And that’s basically how the first version of Neopets was born. Williams was studying art at the time and focused on the graphic design, and Powell had dabbled enough in the web world to work on the programming. Veritable pet owners themselves, they figured virtual pets was a great way to start. Their focus was on creating a site that would be fun and addictive enough to keep people coming back. They were really just bored and looking for something to do that could maybe, just maybe, make them some money. It was first created by two college students from the UK, Donna Williams and Adam Powell, in November of 1999. The site didn’t start out like that of course. Each user was also given a profile, a point of pride for many Neopians, a place to show off and display one’s victories and lineup of pets.
TRUE ASTROLOGY OF TUESDAYS UPGRADE
On their adventures, Neopians could collect “neopoints” by playing the games embedded in each section of the site which could, in turn, be used to feed, clothe, and upgrade their pets.
TRUE ASTROLOGY OF TUESDAYS SERIES
They were all part of the fictional world of Neopia, a series of interconnected webpages with kitschy graphics and embedded Flash games, massive in its scope with a vast and expanding mythos.Įach webpage in Neopia represented a different town for users, or Neopians as they liked to be called, to explore. That is, until you step back and take a look at what connected all these pets together. None of that was particularly mind-blowing (though this was all happening on the web. If you kept up with it, it would be happy. If you neglected your pet, it would get sad.
There were dragons and penguins and elephants and made up creatures of every kind. It’s best to keep in mind, these were no normal pets. Once logged on the site, you could feed your pets, play with them, and even battle them against other Neopets. For the uninitiated, Neopets was, and incredibly still is, a website where users could create and raise virtual pets.
Which at the time (though today less so) was thought particularly egregious considering that Neopets users were mostly kids.īut I really should back up. Neopets even invented a word for what they were doing: immersive advertising Immersive advertising meant showing users ads without them totally realizing that they were ads. And yet if you dig through the archives of the web to learn more about Neopets, you will frequently read about its unique approach to advertising.
The site spawned its own unique economic simulacrum, had a tenuous connection to Scientology, a constantly shifting design, and a dedicated and ambitious fanbase that built it all up brick by brick. Neopets was a massively successful and inclusive digital world, but I think people focus far too much on its advertising model.
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