Neopets
| Fandom | |
|---|---|
| Name: | Neopets |
| Abbreviation(s): | |
| Creator: | Adam Powell, Donna Powell |
| Date(s): | November 15, 1999 - present |
| Medium: | webgame |
| Country of Origin: | UK |
| External Links: | https://www.neopets.com/ |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
This article or section needs expansion. |
Neopets is a virtual pet website, launched in 1999, bought by Viacom in 2005 and then bought by JumpStart in 2014. The site was extremely popular with children in the 2000s, having its own video games, burger king toys, magazines, trading cards, among other things. However, after the acquisition by JumpStart and the initial fanbase growing out of the site, interest started to dwindle.
Overview
The Death of Flash and All That Followed
The death of Flash
In July 2017, it was announced that Flash would be permanently removed via a Windows update in December 2020. The majority of Neopets ran on Flash, everything from the hub worlds, the games, the dress-up system. The death of Flash basically meant the death of everything on the site. The Neopets Team (TNT) insisted that they would be working to have the site working for when Flash went down and they'd be using the opportunity to make Neopets mobile-friendly.[1] The site hadn't been usable on smartphones, despite it being standard practice for many years by this point, so fans were excited to be able to care for their pets on the go.
At the end of December, Flash went down, taking the majority of the site down with it. The site was virtually unusable, with no way to play games for money, no way to customise or even see your pets, and everyone's favourite features gone. A handful of pages had been converted to the new format, but nothing substantial. A couple of the wheels relaunched at the end of January 2021, but by 2022 the site still only had 14 of its previously hundreds of games. Area maps weren't reintroduced until October 2021.
Fans were mad. The Neopets Team were given 3 years warning to have the site ready, and continue to scramble as the deadline is long past.
How long has TNT had to prepare for the end of Flash?LONG ENOUGH.
I know we don't need anymore posts complaining, but I think I'm dying, guys.
RIP[2]
tfw flash is gone and most of the site is broken[3]
Three years of advance notice and one year after Flash EOL and Neopets still hasn't figured out how to make half their site work?[4]
Feel like the real problem that they can't openly discuss is not that they don't know how to do it, but that that they can't find anyone willing to do it for $14 an hour. In California.That TNT is a miserable place to work for from a management perspective (had to work on-site until COVID, little advancement, sudden layoffs, overworked and underpaid) is no small secret.
Some of the staffers said that not all of the Flash Content is coming back even before all of this started, so it wouldn't surprise me terribly if they fixed Customization, put up maybe 20 Games you can just send scores on, and called it a day (removed without the option of doing Classic on) everything else.[5]
Honestly. I genuinely don't understand how it's so difficult to make progress, either - users have found temporary workarounds for making pet lookups display an image, for example, which TNT could do extremely easily. They just... don't. The beta layout isn't even well thought-out (most of the site is inaccessible from within the beta without knowing the URL beforehand), so it's not like they're meticulously trying to iron out every detail before converting the site. Certain things like adding a link to the Neoboard preferences would be so simple and easy that a fourth grader could do it, but they just... don't.[6]
Fan works
| Examples Wanted: Editors are encouraged to add more examples or a wider variety of examples. |
Meta
Fan art
Fan Craft
Fan fiction
- Days of Rayn, 2002
- The Desperado, 2017
- Soft Kisses, 2020
- The Knightmare, 2021
- I Can Bend Resistance, Even Distant, 2022
Zines
Fan Work Rec Lists and Collections
External links
Fan communities and archives
- FanFiction.Net (FFN): [ stories] and [ crossovers]
- LiveJournal (LJ):
- DeviantArt (DA)
- Tumblr: Neopets tag
- Archive of Our Own (AO3): Neopets works
- Pixiv: neopets tag
- Reddit: r/neopets
Fan pages and sites
Resources
- Neopets Wiki on Wikia
- Neopets on Wikipedia
- Neopet's introduces NFTs, burns itself (and it's goodwill) to the ground on r/HobbyDrama
Notes
References
- ^ What's Happening to Neopets When Flash Ends? Producer Chat from Neopets
- ^ How long has TNT had to prepare for the end of Flash? Dec. 29 2020
- ^ tfw flash is gone and most of the site is broken] Jan. 21 2021
- ^ Its been 4 years... Jan 04 2022
- ^ Its been 4 years... comment Jan 04 2022
- ^ Its been 4 years... comment Jan 04 2022
| Related Concepts, Fandoms, Terms, Fanworks | |
| See also | |