Happy Birthday Neopets

This month sees us wish a very happy birthday to the online phenomenon that is Neopets!

Incase you missed it, Neopets is the biggest online virtual pet community and is still going strong to this very day.

Launched on the 15th November 1999 by two British students, Donna Williams and Adam Powell, Neopets opened up the internet and a very willing audience. At a time when downloads roughly took 15 minutes to happen and Ask Jeeves was still busy finding us the answers to all those tricky questions, Neopets was a refreshing and new experience for the online community.

The plan behind Neopets was rudimental and simple enough – by using an online worlds, users could then create, customise to their own unique specifications and care for their very own virtual pets. Parents up and down the country must have been crying a sigh of relief – a pet, but with none of the mess to clean up!

To this day, the site has had over 1.3 trillion site views and continues to have a hard core bunch of users still, today. Although most users moved over to gaming consoles and more advanced games over the coming years after release.

And it is still somewhat understandable why the site does still have a fair few original users left – although a lot of them have now grown up and work for a living, these hard core users still check in to their pets and the online community on a very regular basis. Online communities become a big part of people who use them and the familiarity of the network would provide release and relief for users.

It is clear however that the people behind Neopets have decided to not take the next step needed into the ever changing world of technology. The website looks like it hasn’t been updated in years and is very reminiscent of something that most early 00’s internet users will recognise and remember and there is not mobile based app, allowing for ease of access and mobile gaming.

But, Neopets has clearly still got a hold of these hard core gamers, and we here at Cobweb are pleased that these jewels of the internet of yesterday are still very much alive and kicking and can still be accessed, and more importantly, played!

We’d love to hear your thoughts on Neopets, or another online gaming community – enjoy gaming!