Growing Up Neopets

Hi I'm Zing. Lets be neofriends. I'm a 3rd-year animation student at UNC School of the Arts, and this is how the 90's/2000's virtual pet site Neopets changed my life. For other work of mine, visit my website.

[growingupneopets]

Neo Neopets

In the summer of 2014, completely out of the blue, Neopets announced that JumpStart would be acquiring the company. In the midst of the humongous transition from Viacom’s servers to JumpStart’s that followed, things went haywire, with pages going offline for days or even weeks at a time (some huge parts of the site still aren’t back, despite promises from almost two years ago that they’d be up in a matter of weeks), original members of The Neopets Team leaving or getting laid off, much of the staff being displaced and outsourced to India, and the chat censors and moderators disappearing, resulting in the users’ descent into chaotic anarchy. It seemed like the end of Neopets. Even the acquisition itself is questionable -- how could a floundering company like JumpStart buy such a valuable site from Viacom? (hint: it’s really kind of sketchy)

Although many were wary of JumpStart due to its history of almost exclusively making games for pre-elementary school children, long-time TNT member Snarkie posted on the Neoboards that their interest in Neopets was actually for its older audience. Directly following the acquisition (and pre-Neopocalypse), JumpStart posted an FAQ regarding their plans for the site: specifically mentioning intentions to update the Game Room, and to begin developing mobile apps. But then the staff displacement happened, the quality of everything went downhill, and Neopets was at a standstill for almost two years. Despite a statement from the JumpStart CEO himself promising new features and updates, site glitches still abound, and nothing was getting done.

Bringing Neopets into mobile is its last hope. JumpStart’s plan conjures images of the same vision Neopets creator Donna Williams has had for Neopets since the beginning: an online multiplayer game with an explorable open world, interesting fantasy plots, and customizable playable pet characters. Everything that Neopets had on the website, but in an adventure game, and on mobile platforms! Before JumpStart’s acquisition, it seemed like that’s where they were headed. As early as 2006, Neopets developed a mobile game accessed via the most ancient form of the mobile web browser. It didn't fly very far, since few phones back then had the capacity to play the game. Too far-fetched for its time. Later, after smart phones got big, TNT held a contest to name an upcoming new iteration of the app, along with a concept trailer. Sadly, likely due to JumpStart’s incredibly limited funding, there is still no news on how or even if that’s coming, past the empty "it’s in the early stages!" from a year ago.

That is until this past March, (seriously! this happened while I was writing this!) there was a quiet release of JumpStart’s first Neopets mobile game. It’s not the Donna vision, not even close. More like just another of their Flash games, but just happens to be available on some other platforms. Ghoul Catchers, available on smart phones, tablets, and Facebook, is actually just a reskinning of Candy Crush. You can earn Neopoints on it, and that’s about as far as they’ve come in the nearly two years since JumpStart came on board. The mobile version of the Neopets site (still only a site, not an app) still doesn’t even go past the home page, so this copycat game is the only aspect of Neopets available on mobile.

I partially understand where they’re coming from with the plan. Release new Neopets games as their own thing on mobile, so that maybe the average app store peruser will play them and that will lead them to Neopets. Except that this isn’t even an original game, so nobody has any reason to play it unless they already have an account on Neopets and just want to earn Neopoints on their phone. So the game’s only real audience is someone who already plays Neopets, the population of which is going down fast as the site continues in its stagnation. Not a good business plan.

Post Neopets life, I’ve played a few other games based around similar ideas of multiplayer socializing and customization. When I was starting to wean myself off Neopets at the beginning of high school -- maybe I was a little old for this but I liked it anyhow -- I got into Club Penguin. Looking back, this was what Neopets should have been. In this free-to-play online game, you walked around environments as your own customized penguin character, furnished your house, played minigames, chatted with other players, and did quests. The perfect next step from what Neopets was at the time, meanwhile Neopets was failing hard at pushing itself into the next decade.

Fast forward. I’m twenty, and in college. Nintendo suddenly released their first mobile game, Miitomo, and not only am I playing it daily, but I only discovered it because half my friends are playing it, too. Yet another customization/socialization game. In this game you make a little you, dress them up with clothes you buy with points you get from answering questions that your friends will see, and commenting on your friends’ answered questions. It’s not perfect, but it keeps me coming back for the daily prizes, the social aspect, and the fun of revamping my Mii’s outfit over and over -- much like Neopets once did. Even for being free to play, it’s apparently raking in a lot of revenue with the in-game purchases. Much like Neopets.

So here is my proposition for how Neopets and JumpStart ought to (but probably won’t) go about their transition to mobile. As much as I love to imagine Neopets becoming the amazing mobile app of Donna’s vision, with explorable worlds and quests, maybe it’s better to start it small, focusing on the heart of the game: the pets, the customization, and the friendship.

So imagine you download this app, "Neopets Go!" or something -- you’re first asked to make your username, small customizations to your profile, etc. Typical of these types of games. Then it has you select a pet from the thumbnails of all the different species. It pops up and says "Hi, I’m… Well, I guess, I don’t have a name yet," and asks you to name her. After a loading screen, you’re brought into an empty room, and your pet is walking around in it. You can tap on her to interact with her, similar to Nintendogs, except Neopets can talk. Your new little buddy! She exclaims that she’s so excited to be here with you!!

From there, you can click on the menu to go to shops (to buy toys, food, clothes, and furniture for the room), friends (to see their pets/rooms -- maybe a simple messaging system? GPS-based friend locator?), and play mini-games to earn points (just simple ones from the original Game Room that would translate well to finger-tapping, like Destruct-O-Match or Whack-a-Sloth). I’m already hooked. After playing Miitomo these last couple of weeks, I can’t help but just imagine it with Neopets.

Prior to discovering their new mobile game, I was 100% okay with the Neopets website just dying after so many years of floundering. If they don’t have the funding to make it good anymore, they should just end it already, you know? But now I have a little glimmer of hope -- that even though it’s not going well right now, maybe they at least know what they’re doing by moving to mobile, maybe it’ll eventually be profitable enough that they can afford to make it better. They just have to do it right. So now I’m kind of excited to see where they go with it, if they can. I just feel like that’s a really big "if."

[growingupneopets]

The Site that Inspired the Comics that Inspired Me

When I first started Growing Up Neopets and was planning out what I'd write for it, somehow this subject hadn't even come to my mind. But last week I was being interviewed for Audrey Rabine's documentary project about comics -- webcomics in particular being a huge passion of mine -- and she asked me how I first got into them. Surprise surprise, memories came flooding in of 10-year-old me reading comic strips on the Neopian Times, the weekly Neopets newspaper with all its content created by users themselves, selected to publish by The Neopets Team. It made me realize that all the really good artists I found on Neo who made the best petpages and inspired me the most had been discovered somehow or another through the NT. So I decided to go back into its archives, and find all my favorites from days long passed.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Pint Sized by Natasha Soglin, a.k.a. Lachtaube Pint Sized was a gag strip following the shenanigans of aloof, cheeky ghost (ghost being a paintable colour of neopets) lupe Ubuu and tiny, potato-obsessed brown lupe Emsohl. Both are Natasha's actual Neopets, and there were often cameos of her others, especially as the comic went on. It was entirely led by the shenanigans created by these strong personalities colliding, but more often riffed on mid-2000's Neopets. Natasha was just 14 when she started publishing to the NT, and I was probably around 12 when I first found her work. She continued to publish Pint Sized and several collaborative efforts until 2013. Her Neopets characters that she developed outside of the comic were the most interesting to me, however, with grim stories of ghosts and re-animated corpses, and sometimes grotesque artwork to accompany them. Pint Sized often had a sort of wry humor to it, but was definitely the more lighthearted of her work on Neo.

Natasha went on to be a professional illustrator and concept artist, according to her deviantART. As of 2014, she is an asset artist for educational game company Filament Games, and continues to create new characters and stories on her own time.

Some of her post-Neopets work: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- And the Meepits Outgrabe by Lin Christianson-Derricks, a.k.a. Kittylin

This comic is just sickeningly cute. And the Meepits Outgrabe seems to have been the one to invent the idea of the Neopets "family," starring a kitty self-insert of Lin as the Neo-momma, toddler-age lupe Miles Foxx, airheaded faerie gelert Suzer, and teen-angst-ridden striped lupe Seth. Lin's drawings have this delightful sensitivity to the lines and coloring which I've always admired, and the treatment of the writing of the family of characters is just too charming not to at least smile at. Outside the comic, all her Neopets have fully customized petpages with their own personal biographies, told through their perspective as toddlers and teens and the like, with accompanying art.

According to her LiveJournal which last updated in 2012, Lin is now a real mom with two babies. Shortly after she married in 2006, she had baby Bina, and these new experiences were reflected in And the Meepits Outgrabe with the arrival of the baby xweetock, "JellyBina," and all the antics that ensue with the coming of a new baby. The comic ended shortly after, but Lin's life as a real mom seems to have just gotten started.

This was one of the last of And the Meepits Outgrabe: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Spooky by Victoria "Komori" Alexander, a.k.a. Ghostkomorichu

By far my favorite of all the comics that ran in the Neopian Times, Spooky was everything I loved: cute-as-heck art, silliness, and ghosts. This one in particular holds up very well. I still find myself fawning over the adorable expressions and art style, and the iconic character designs. The cast is a pretty classic mix: the naive, the aloof, and the type-A (and an additional aloof added later on) -- two ghosts and a korbat and their misadventures in the Haunted Woods castle they call home. Like many others of the time, there's lots of riffing on Neopets culture, plots, games, items, etc, but the artwork and writing of the gags is just really top-notch in comparison to the rest.

Komori was 17 when she started Spooky in 2004, and seems to be continuing it to this day, its last update being the four-part 2015 Halloween special. According to her deviantART, she's now now a SCAD alumnus working for Floyd County Productions, having animated and illustrated for the sixth season of Archer. She also has a non-Neopets-related webcomic, Vampire Bites. Komori recently posted a goodbye message to the original Neopets Team after they were laid off when Jumpstart acquired the company. It reads, "Thank you so much... For Looking at my portfolio and giving me pointers at Comic Con for three years. For considering me as a possible hire a couple of times. For a platform of 12 years of Spooky comics. For commonality shared with friends, both online and off. For countless hours of enjoyment and happiness. Neopets has been pretty important to me. Thank you for being a part of that." Though I wasn't at the right age at the right time to have had the same experiences, I can't help but share that senitment. I guess I also just appreciate knowing that I'm not the only one who feels so strongly about this virtual pet website, whose life was shaped so forcefully just for having started playing it at some point, and letting those experiences snowball into who I am now, as a person and artist.

[growingupneopets]

Real Friends

I had a dream back when I was twelve or so. In it, I was exploring a creek -- a common activity of mine for that age -- accompanied by a friend of mine. This obviously had to have been a dream, because that particular friend was someone I only knew through good old AIM text messaging, never met in person. I made friends with her over the online art forum Sutaro Sketcher Oekaki, a girl around my age who shared my interest in drawing and Neopets, and so with whom I chatted often and traded art. Having never met her in person, my mind's vision of her came from a photo she sent me. Looking back on it, this was a manifestation of just how entertwined with the internet my life has always been.

Of course, I had friends in person like any other kid, and we'd romp around outside and explore creeks and whatnot in the real world, but my online relationships were equally as important to me, and have always been huge part of my development as a person.

Online friendship in my early years was formed via the Neopets boards and neomail. My first online friend, who I probably met when I was around 8 or 9, was a boy from the Middle East claiming to be 18. His English was a little iffy, but that didn't stop us from having ample character-driven roleplay sessions. Roleplay was the best way for me to find online friendship in those days: an activity in creativity and imagination that could span just a few messages, or a few thousand -- stories never had to end, so the entertainment didn't either. Friendships would form naturally from there.

Then I started meeting artists on Neopets who did digital drawings to decorate their petpages and userlookups. Some were my age, but many were three or four years older, and at the time much more skilled than I was. We motivated each other through artistic feedback, and their art inspired me to improve my own, and to keep drawing. Eventually I discovered art communities outside Neopets, namely Sutaro Sketcher and deviantART, where I came across more artists, most notably those who drew my absolute favorite thing at the time: dragons! I made a handful of really good friends from there, with whom I interacted often.

Eventually one of them invited me to join a Skype group chat. At this point I was around 12 or 13. The group chat was an incessant bloo-orp noise on my computer for a while, but I was hesitant to join in on such a tight-knit group. Then I started popping in for the occasional voice calls, and really started to get to know all the people in the group through the hours and hours of almost nightly voice chats we had throughout the following years. I knew the one person who invited me, screenname Draco, from deviantART -- the rest, it turns out, found each other through community-created game Pokemon Aurora (PAU). A lot of them had been admins there, and so had formed tight bonds from the shared experiences of the calamity of running a multiplayer gaming community. No wonder I had trouble breaking into their clique at first.

I was one of a handful of friends added on a whim by Draco. As the chat grew from the little group of admins into a huge 16-person incessantly-active chat, it was a utopia of conversation and friendship. We played games together, baraged online drawing sites like PaintChat and iScribble, shared art, and had all the deep and meaningful conversation 12- to 18-year-olds could have with each other. As great as it was, the dynamics of the group were about as volatile as the US's bipartisan political system. With so many big personalities and hotheaded young people,

fights sometimes broke out. At times one person might break off from the chat and start another just to avoid someone they were sparring with. Then they made up, things were fine for a while, Minecraft worlds were made together, intellectually stimulating conversations were had, only to be suddenly ruined when someone else had a hissy fit over something someone said and would exit the chat with dramatic flair. Through all these cataclysmic events, and all its changes in membership over the years, the chat and many of the friendships within it have been maintained for almost 9 years now. The chat is now left with only three of its original founding members from PAU, six people total, but one of whom I've become closer to than almost anyone I've met in my life, cyberspace or meatspace.

Michael LeBlanc, screenname ling-ling7892 (and whom I've always referred to as Ling), was one of the founding members, three years older than me. Unlike my rich experience in the internet starting in my primary school years, Michael got online only after being put out of tennis due to an injury and the need for a new hobby. His friend referred him to PAU, he got really into it, became an admin, and the rest is history. If the Skype chat was a bipartisan political system, Ling was Independent. Over time, the two of us have been frequently denoted Mom and Dad of the chat, since we so often served as the intermediaries when sparring matches were happening or when someone ragequit the group. We kept level heads and low emotions. I guess that's why we clicked at first. As the group eventually split into smaller chats, we were always included in one or another, and always together, so we grew closer by default.

As everyone got older, people started either graduating college or leaving for it, and many people drifted away from participating in the chat just for one reason or another. These days it's gotten pretty silent, though still has the occasional bout of activity in the form of ten or so messages, but it's few and far between. Ling and I, however, still have regular calls together each week, and text each other daily. We've always been like that. Back when I was in highschool, he was going to college near Orlando, so when my family went to Disney World for the first time, he met us there and roamed the park with us. That was our first time meeting in-person. Later, he took a trip up to Savannah, GA (twice!) for a couple vacations with us. My family and friends even knew him long before that, since I mention him in conversation all the time. He was and still is a big part of my life, and my emotional growth, as we've helped eachother through trying times over the years.

But why would our friendship be maintained so strongly for so long, when we're such different people? Michael LeBlanc, all the way down in the sunshine state: loves heavy metal and electronica, majored in finance, is a huge video game nerd, honor student, moved to NYC to work for J.P. Morgan Chase right out of college, doesn't act like he likes people very much but totally seems to have his life together. Zing Grem: art geek, humanist, not a fan of school, likes progressive rock and jazz, prefers books to video games, went to UNCSA for visual arts in the 12th grade, yet, 3.5 years into a 4-year animation major, doesn't actually know what she wants to do with her life. Ling and I don't even really do a lot together when we have Skype calls, mostly we just talk about life or media, or even sit in silence while we go about our computer activities, occasionally linking to a funny picture or video. We've also visited each other in meatspace a number of times now, and are always planning on the next get-together. Why are we so attached?

With internet friends, you just can't leave each other by happenstance. Unlike in meatspace -- where my best friend and I eventually stopped talking after she transferred to a new highschool, or I lost touch with friends from home after I left for UNCSA my senior year -- the internet follows you, and with the internet come your internet friends. During highschool I stayed up late nights for hours in group Skype calls. My first few years at UNCSA had been basically the same. Even without my computer, I still have my phone, and a phone call or text message is no different than our interactions on Skype, so those are easy replacements. They're just always there. This was amplified, I think, with the big Skype chat. As Ling put it, "If you're in the same chat, you're not going to completely ignore one of only six people that's in there. Like, it's much easier to ignore someone when you're in a classroom, because you can physically distance yourself, but when there's an entire chat, you can't do that. You say 'hi' and everyone answers." It's forced friendship, almost -- and eventually forced trust building.

I was delighted to discover that the very first Google search listing for "online friendship" is Jeff Goins' The Problem with Online Friendship, and it's the top for good reason. It's a fantastic, albeit brief, analysis of the unique and potentially disastrous dynamic online friendship presents. He talks about how easy it is to become intimate, to know eachother's lives in and out, but also how easy it is to cut someone off if they say or do something that bothers you. Just leave the chat. Ignore or block. So you can pick your friends, avoid conflict, but all the while you're missing out on having fulfilling relationships with people who challenge you. He ends it with "What if we didn’t walk away when things got hard?" and "Well, then we might actually be friends." Well, I think all that turmoil of the old Skype chat just proves it. We were friends, amazing friends. We really had something there, something that markedly shaped who all of us are today. And some of us still have that something. We just have to remember to sustain it with purpose, be committed and trustworthy -- same as any relationship, meatspace or cyberspace.

[growingupneopets]

The Life and Times of Neopets.com

In our last installment, I discussed my own history with Neopets, how I was raised in this online world and how my interactions with it shaped who I am today. But the full story of Neopets had begun much before I came around to it.

Our story begins a decade or so before the overabundance of cutesy online pet games like Webkinz and Club Penguin, a time just before the garrish adolescent stage of the internet populated by MySpace profiles with auto-playing MP3s and red Comic Sans text on poorly compressed jpg background -- it is November 15th, 1999, and booming young British couple Adam Powell and Donna Williams have just released their novel website Neopets. The original idea was cutting edge, according to Donna -- a Java-based Zelda-style game where you were the Neopet walking around inside its own world, but the idea was scaled down as they moved the game toward a more maneagable webpage-based style with Flash and Java elements thrown in. With Adam at the helm doing programming and databasing and Donna doing the designs and artwork, Neopets.com was born: a surprisingly extensive site where the user creates and cares for a virtual pet, plays games, earns in-world currency to invest in in-world stocks or buy items to spruce up their pets or show off to other players, and explores the virtual world of Neopia.

During the first few months of the site, the creators and their team used it as a playground of sorts. The community was small in the beginning, like any, although growing quickly. Users were often involved in the creation of aspects of the site, such as voting on new pets, names, or designs. You can look through a collection of all the pet design contests and voting polls here. Things were a little nutty.

The original "Bruce," modeled after English entertainer Bruce Forsyth, and its later redesigns.

Left two: the Badeek, which later became the Kacheek. Right two: the Fleye, which later became the Buzz.

The site and its features grew as it gained members. Plots, intricate and alluring stories of Neopia told through comics and puzzles, ended up being the main holder of interest for both the players and the site's creators, who eagerly pumped out new characters and enticing story arcs which lasted weeks at a time. The first in these early days, for instance, led to the discovery of the Battledome, where pets could then train and level up their fighting abilities, a feature that would be used in many a war-based site-wide plot henceforth.

The real boom of Neopets happened after it was purchased by Doug Dohring in 2000, who began the push for better advertising to monetarily support the site and its team, still headed by the founders Adam and Donna. Using a method now trademarked as "immersive advertising," Neopets had no banner ads, instead relying on in-game product placement, for instance in one of its Flash games the user brushes a Grarrl's teeth with a Crest battery-powered toothbrush, or they can purchase Capri Sun or Kraft Mac and Cheese as food items. Neopets and Dohring were heavily lauded in the business world for such brilliant advertising methods, as banner-based advertising had been becoming decreasingly effective at the time, though they received some criticism from consumer advocacy groups for marketing products so aggressively to children. But this method, in combination with the site being among the top at the time for "stickiness" -- a term describing the average amount of time users spend on the site -- made it immensely marketable and profitable.

As the site matured into professionalism with well-needed art redesigns (note the major shift in the pet designs from earlier^) and a huge and growing user base in 2002 and '03, the Neopets team (lovingly dubbed TNT by the users, a monicker the staff eventually picked up for themselves) began merchandising the site. Keeping up with the trend of Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh cards, they created a card game based on characters and items from the site-wide plots, along with various stuffed animals and interactive toys of the various pet species. This was when I got into it, and is also the version of the site many of my friends remember most fondly. The Flash games where one made neopoints were addictive and fun, the Neoboards were booming, TNT was super in-touch with the community -- it was a utopia.

And what better time to milk a cash cow than at its fattest? In 2005, Viacom (owner of Nickelodeon) purchased Neopets, without any say from the founders, for $160 million, with big plans for revamp. Feeling that Viacom did not share their interests in the site's future, Donna and Adam left to start a new game project. A little over a year later, Neopets.com had the most major facelift in all its history.

The site layout became blocky, divider-based, and all the pet artwork was redrawn as vector art, the .png images replaced with Java outlets -- the pets were now fully customizable with purchasable clothing and backgrounds! Additionally there were enormous banner ads framing each page, and the product placement games were now the only new games coming out, and the "Neopets Mall" where one could purchase the new customization items used real money, not the in-game neopoints. Cash cow milked. But it sure looked pretty.

The site was still pretty cool, although in a different way, and all the new features that were happening with pet customization were interesting and kind of fun, but as the years went on with Viacom at the helm, so much of what I loved began to be replaced. Code-writing in order to create customized userlookups and petpages was being censored more and more by the new establishment, and most of my friends began populating other sites. My interest in Neopets waned, but I stuck with it until around 2010.

It was actually around that time that the in-game neopoints economic system apparently had such bad inflation that it was no longer accessable to new players. That, coupled with older non-sponsored site features being neglected by staff, and a lack of updating new features and site-wide communal events, so began Neopets' slow decline. Without warning, in 2014, Viacom sold Neopets to aged edutainment-game company JumpStart as part of a cleanout of their dying acquisitions, JumpStart potentially getting rights to Viacom-owned characters for future game spinoffs in the trade. This is where I'd normally put a link to my source, but it seems to have disappeared since my discovery of it several weeks ago. I have contacted the author and hopefully it will be returned soon. Surprisingly, JumpStart's stated interest in the site was for "its older audience," although it has yet to show. The site has since gone into complete disarray, although it would not appear so on the homepage, which remains the same as it's been since the 2007 revamp. JumpStart laid off almost the entire original art team and staff, resulting in a drop in art quality as well as an incredibly high amount of down time for the site. It is quite apparent it cannot hold itself up on such low budget.

In June 2015, something incredible happened. One day, out of nowhere, the moderators for the Neoboards were gone, and the chat restrictions vanquished, for seemingly no reason at all. The boards fell into hell. "In one thread, a user solicited casual sex. In another, an intrepid Neopian posted the entire script of Bee Movie, one paragraph at a time." Hostility, calamity, vulgarity -- everything just erupted (click this for a good read), and the earthquake was felt across the web. Within 24 hours, the boards were shut down, but the thousands of Neopians had made their voices heard. Not, perhaps, by JumpStart, who continues to struggle financially, but to the rest of the internet. One last dying vocalization of a site that has outlived the greatest. Despite my history with it, I, personally, will not be sad to see it go when it does at last. I'd like to remember it in its prime, not as the sad shriveled thing it is today.

But its death is undoubtedly a marvelous a display.

[growingupneopets]

My REALLY IMPORTANT history with Neopets

I started playing Neopets when I was probably 8. I learned about it in 2004 from a commercial about a little robot Scorchio toy that I then begged my mother to buy me at Target and which happened to have a URL on its butt that I then begged my father to find on the internet for me, and I suppose the rest is history. I don't remember much of what I did on that site at that age, but my earliest memory is what might have been my first attempt to draw my little dragon creature in order to enter the drawing in the site "Beauty Contest." Sure wish I still had that drawing. I certainly put up a big deal trying to get my totally-not-techno-savvy dad to photograph it and make the file size small enough to upload. I didn't win (that contest is all about advertising anyway).

So I suppose that was the beginning of not only my life on Neopets, but equally my life as an artist. Maybe even just my life in general. All my biggest memories are from Neopets, and I celebrate that. Here's why.

These pets were basically my own characters from the beginning. It all began with a name. I probably tried to name my first dude Lava or something, but of course that would've already been taken. With my ingenious childhood creativity, I brewed up the most original definitely-won't-be-taken name I could: Laaksurigo. Yeah, I don't know. My first username was "sortru." Still don't know. That account still exists, by the way, and you can totally see my glorious "11 1/2 years" shield on the user-lookup. Gaze upon the representation of over half my life...

February 20th, 2004 is the "started playing" date, so says that particular user-lookup. How incredible it is to think that my life has been so thoroughly documented online from then on.

Eventually I had my parents sign the waver of consent that let an under-13-year-old edit customize their pages and go on the "Neoboards" forum. That's when the entire world opened up to me, literally; all at once, I could speak with others from all over the world, freely and without censor. I don't have any damaging memories involving what one might expect to find as a child exploring the free speech of the interwebs. Maybe I've just locked them away, to be discovered much later by some distraught therapist when I finally snap someday. Mental health aside, truthfully my only memories from the boards are good ones -- from the general topics to roleplay boards, I met really interesting people, sometimes so interesting that we would bring our discussions to private messages. I vividly recall the novel-length roleplays that happened via private mail. Our pets served as our characters, and through our back-and-forth writing they would go on adventures, have romances, make enemies, get married, make babies, even die honorably in battle or blissfully as wise old grandparents. All those great things ten-year-olds play about. I'm not sure if any of this formally honed my writing at all, since they were more often formatted as:

Laaksurigo: *stares into Sonar's eyes* I... I think... I think I love you, Sonar o///o

Sonar: 0/////0 Laak, I-

Laaksurigo: Sonar... I have to ask... *kisses her on the cheek and curls up around her* will you be... my mate?

Sonar: *looks up at the stars wistfully, getting sleepy* Of course I will... *dozes off to sleep in his embrace*

So much romance. So much. That's all I remember of roleplaying. Then they'd wake up and there'd be an egg sitting next to them. And it'd "hatch" into twins so each of us could get a sibling. That's how it works, right?

All this at least started me thinking about character building. I really got in deep when I discovered these people who go all out on their petpages, writing dramatic backstories and drawing graphics for them, and coding these gorgeous layouts straight from HTML/CSS. Neopets conveniently had some beginner HTML tutorials, so I started on that to catch up. Had to make my pets as legit as these peoples'! At first I just copied code from the pages of others', but by customizing it line by line I learned what things did what, how to make a divider here, a mini scrollbar box here, a floating image here. Eventually I was writing it all myself. And, much like the rest of mid-00's web, I even coded an auto-playing mp3 for each page so all my pets had their own meaningful theme songs to go with their brilliantly written personalities.

For instance, to the right is a relic I discovered while perusing my oldest Neopets accounts. Meet Nixxen4415 the kougra. His personality is... fire. I think. He looks a little emo, too. Probably had some dark gothy music playing on his page. Yeah.

That's from 2006. I got a tiny graphics tablet a mere year or two after starting Neopets, to allow me to draw on the computer like all those cool neopians I was seeing with their fancy customized pages. What a huge step that was, and boy did I make use of Microsoft Paint as best I could. Look at that luscious pen-tool-manship. (I actually didn't learn how to properly use the pen tool until like two years ago).

Then the most amazing thing happened: the oekaki boards. They're so mystical, so foreign, even to this day -- all kinds of different people and varying skill levels commingling on one art forum -- yet it was the next stepping stone in my journey mastering digital art. Oekaki are (were?) forums where people post and comment on things drawn using the built-in browser-based art programs that had slightly more comprehensive tools than MS Paint. My first and only was Sutaro Sketcher Oekaki, the official oekaki of Neopets-fan-site Sutaro.com, and through that I found the most incredible digital drawings and paintings I'd ever seen, all drawn by other Neopets users, some my age or slightly younger, some as old as 18 or 20 (wow that was so old to me back that). So I tried my own hand at it, and posted things, and talked to people about it, and got critique, and gave critique.

But most importantly, I met people. People I befriended on SSO led me to the slightly infamous DeviantART, but back then it was just friend city. I never knew so many people, seen so many artists, gotten so much feedback. The most amazing thing is, I still talk to at least five of them almost daily. That's pretty crazy for having never met most of them in person, and having befriended them when I was a tiny 6th-grader.

But it was all because of Neopets. I got into drawing, writing, webcoding, graphic design, character and world building, even made some of my best friends; all from Neopets.

As a closer, have some other relics I picked up from my old DeviantART page. Not quite as ancient -- these date around 2007. I was 12.

This was my dragon OC Zooky. Look at that soft brush, and layers! Layers!!!! Thank God for Oekaki.

A self portrait titled "DO NOT CLICK" in order to get attention. Nothing has changed. (right)>>>>>

(below) Quote: "This is my Neopet, Larynx, in a silly drawing style. It's really fun drawing her all cartoony like this!" I named my bori Layrnx because I learned that word in a science class and thought it was cool.

My friend was telling me about this "Paint Shop Pro" program. So I got a 30-day trial. (right)>>>>>

(below) Apparently I started drawing them as "anthro" at some point. Probably based on a webcomic.

In 8th grade I got Photoshop Elements, which was bundled with the $50 Bamboo Fun tablet (a tablet that has lasted longer than I ever thought possible for modern technology. Wacom is a good brand).

A hissi from 2009... I still think this is really cool... (right)>>>>

(below) Zooky got fat

Okay last one. I also like this one. Freshman year of high school was some good times.

That's all folks! Check out my website to see how far we've come!

[growingupneopets]

Hello, World!

Welcome one and all! This blog is a compilation project breaking down and discussing Neopets through a handful of relevant topics, including how my autobiography can basically be summed up by Neopets, interviews with others about their experience with Neopets, the site’s history, adults playing Neopets, and more. Stay tuned.