Long ago, there was a web game called Neopets.  It was basically a collection of minigames, combined with Pokemon-like cockfighting.  When I was about 13 or 14, EVERYONE was into it:  Male, female, kids, pederasts… It was a sensation.

If you’re unfamiliar, I’ll give you a quick rundown.  There are a bunch of cute little animals you could adopt in a variety of colours and designs, with whom you can play games (Which are more often than not cutely redecorated clones of Apple IIe 5 1/4in floppy titles reprogrammed in Flash), train at various schools to raise their stats, and of course, have the viciously beat the hell out of each other.

The site was initially started by two Welsh people in California, named Adam Powell and Donna Williams.  It was essentially a website full of games for college students to pass the time.  Of course, the cutesy look attracted more and more players, mostly young kids like myself, and the whole thing began to take off.  The site grew, the staff grew, and eventually they realized that they were losing ridiculous amounts of money.  They tried to make it up without advertising on the site:  Merchandise was the way to go.  Limited Too, Hot Topic, Claire’s Boutique and others began carrying stuffed animals, t-shirts, jewelry and action figures, and admittedly, it was pretty cool.

Obviously, it didn’t work for long.  And along with adding small ads to the site, service started to slip: Reports of accounts being banned by mistake, rude responses by customer service personnel, and just an overall feeling of ‘what happened’ plagued the site.  I would later find out that it had been owned by a group of investors, as a publicly traded company, for quite some time.

And it was still losing money.

I quit, for a long time.  It happens, I guess:  It was an addiction I just outgrew, unlike heroin (There are no 12-step programs for Neopets to my knowledge).  I went on to other things, better games, communities with an average age higher than 12.  That was a long time ago.

Recently though, I saw my foster-sister playing something vaguely familiar.  I cocked an eyebrow and asked ‘Is that Neopets?’  She responded that it was, and was surprised I knew about it, after all I’m almost 7 years older than her.  I started to wonder if my old account was still there.  It was.  But it was buried in a mountain of obnoxious flash ads, a cash store for additional content, and many, many ‘updated’ games.

Much of the site now centered around ‘Neocash,’ the game’s RMT currency, with spotlights for the pets who have had the most of mom’s hard-earned cash spent to make the look tacky.  Many years-old promises have not been fulfilled, like finishing old plot arcs, and making the collectible clothes already in existence wearable by your pets.

Worst of all, the flash games are either drawn at such a high resolution, or just so poorly coded, that it takes a modern computer to run them.  Read that again:  IT TAKES A MODERN COMPUTER TO RUN A FLASH GAME THAT TAKES A MAXIMUM OF 3 MINUTES TO PLAY.

I really don’t know what else to say.  Humanity is doomed?  Everything has to evolve and change, but this feels more than a little sick.  I guess there’s not much else to it though:  It’s a publicly traded company, so it exists to make a profit.  Even so, fighting as a Cybunny soldier in the great Sloth wars is one of the few fuzzy memories of my early-mid teens.

I remember Eliv Thade, the great Lord of Anagrams.  I remember the Lab Ray which could perform unwanted Sexual Reassignment Surgery in seconds flat.  I remember my pets who fought valiantly against the evil Dr. Sloth, lord of all things slow and lazy.

I miss Neopets.  As casual-market video games go, it was tops.  Seriously.