Neopets.com was the greatest fantasy world of all time
Followed closely by the Church of Scientology.
Step aside Lord of the Rings, Broken Earth, Mistborn, and Dungeons & Dragons. The 1999-2005 era of Neopets was the greatest fantasy world of all time.
Welcome to the The Worldbuilding Hall of Fame, the sporadic series where we celebrate and discuss pop culture phenomenons made famous by their exceptional worldbuilding. Think Y2K computer games, celebrity personas, consumer brands (shoutout to my pride and joy, Aura Bora), retail stores, cursed airports, and cults.
Worldbuilding is not limited to the sci-fi and fantasy genre. It’s all around us. It could be anywhere. It's like trying to catch smoke... like trying to catch smoke with your bare hands.
Worldbuilding:
The process of creating a detailed and immersive fictional universe. This includes things like geography, creatures, culture, lore, religion, languages, and magic systems.
Welcome to Neopia
In 1999, I sat at our family computer station becoming permanently nearsighted via the Kid Pix Studio Deluxe balloon pen tool. The modem fan was burning the baby hairs off my calves. The corners of my lips were split and bleeding from an Otter Pop. The Corrs was playing. I was just 5 years old and already wondering to myself, could life get any better?
Little did I know, Adam Powell and Donna Williams were about to launch Neopets.com, the greatest virtual pet site ever created. I would spend the next 25 years and 10,000+ hours learning how to read, gamble, stock trade, chase Meercas, and keep a family of five from falling on hard times.
To this day, I firmly believe Neopets was the greatest fantasy world every created. Also, to this day I’m still an active player thanks to a stranger who sent me my login info on Twitter following a massive Neopets data breach in 2022. My favorite data breach to date 💕
So, what makes Neopets so great?
Here’s the thing, I don’t have all day. Though, I know this makes it seems like I do. So instead of writing a thesis on every beautiful corner of Neopia, I’m going to summarize things in a controversial listicle.
Here are 5 things that make Neopets so unbelievably special.
A legendary world map
There’s nothing quite like opening a new fantasy book to a hand-drawn map.
Well, take that feeling and give it crack and you have Neopia—an interactive, ever-changing fantasy map of 19+ mystical lands. Neopia is an ecologically and culturally diverse planet in the Goldilocks Zone of an unknown star system. It has continents and strings of islands and unknown lands that are home to every Neopet, petpet, and petpetpet in the universe. Almost every living creature resides there except for the Grundos enslaved by Dr. Sloth on the space station.
Neopia is so immersive it has its own weather systems, wintery poles, deserts, jungles, and swamps. It even has its own periodic table of elements including Neopium (Np), Tyrannium (Ty), Slothite (Sl), Faeryllium (Fae), and Krawkite (Kr). This is not a comprehensive list. Remember, I don’t have all day.
The map of Neopia has evolved many times since 1999, as users have discovered new lands, islands have disappeared, and there has remained a longstanding debate about the existence of Jelly World.
I cannot fathom the level of care and attention to detail that went into building an entire biodiverse planet with shops, games, written history, foods, traditions, cities, and gods.
The Giant Omelette
If your Neopets are hungry (they are always hungry), you can stop by the Tyrannian Plateau once a day for a free slice from the Giant Omelette. Taking care of Neopets is a full-time job. I’m constantly relying on welfare programs in Neopia like the Giant Omelette, The Soup Kitchen, and the Giving Tree to keep them barely alive.
The Omelette is exactly what it sounds like. And it’s the perfect example of the moments of delight and hidden easter eggs that abound in the Neopets universe.
"Legend has it that hundreds of years ago, a dinosaur of gigantic proportions laid a massive egg. That egg split open, and started to bake in the sun. Ever since then, a giant omelette has been cooking on the Tyrannian Plateau. It may seem silly, but it is true.” -Neopets.Fandom
Neopets, PetPets, and PetPetPets
Adam Powell and Donna Williams left no crumbs when they created over 30 species of Neopets. Each creature is carefully crafted with it’s own habitat, special power, and notable attack like static cling and pillow throwing.My personal favorites are Draiks (18), Shoyrus (19), Kacheeks (50), Kougras (42), and Meercas (37).
And as if things couldn’t get any more delightful, Neopets are able to keep their own pets called PetPets. And PetPets can also keep their own pets, which are obviously called PetPetPets. (It’s giving Boaty McBoatface).
Every whimsical, soulful, and complex creature in Neopia is testimony to the uninhibited, delightful minds of their Great Creators. And that is a beautiful thing.
Note: This is a good opportunity for you to look at the Neopet glossary above and choose your personality if it were embodied in one of them. But if you choose 51, you’re a pick-me.The Neopian Stock Market (NEODAQ)
In 2020, I was hired by a fintech app in San Francisco to design their brand. And that is when I discovered that my only financial literacy came from trading stocks on the NEODAQ, and selling rare Neggs at the Neggery like modern-day NFTs. To be clear, this did not make me a good employee. I still do not understand what an IRA is.
The NEODAQ Stock Index is a marketplace for buying and trading Neopets commodities with Neopoints, the in-game currency. It’s still alive and well today, and you can even track the market every 30 minutes here. As I’m writing this, it looks like Kacheek and Sons Landscaping (KSON) is seeing a lot of volatility. In what world did a game with 50+ million tweenage users need a true-to-life stock market?
There was one silver lining to becoming a 13-year-old day trader. After a 2004 collusion scandal that temporarily toppled the Neopets economy, I had the wisdom and foresight to predict the 2008 market crash. I saved my parents millions of dollars. Thank you NEODAQ!!!!!!!!!!!!! *
Scientology
Picture this: Tom Cruise and John Travolta in the Neopets office eating Ugga Melon Omelettes and holding Shoyru plush toys. I don’t know if that happened but I feel in my soul that it did.Every fantasy world needs lore. And the best kind of lore is cult-adjacent. Though the Neopets founders were not aware at the time, their first investors were Scientologists. And those investors obviously had a secret agenda: to build pro-Scientology education onto the Neopets website experience.
From a 2014 Reddit AMA with Cofounder Donna Williams. Honestly… I gotta give credit where credit is due. The Church of Scientology absolutely slays at worldbuilding. They really saw the Neopets homepage and said REAL RECOGNIZE REAL.
Here, let’s play a game: Is this story from the Neopets Book of Ages or Scientology’s sacred texts?Xenu was the dictator of a galactic confederacy of 76 planets, who was captured and imprisoned on Earth 75 million years ago after bringing billions of his people to Earth, placing them around volcanoes and killing them by using hydrogen bombs. -Wikipedia
I really appreciate that the Neopets lore is layered. The fictional world seems to reach its fingers beyond Neopia, beyond the codebase, and all the way to the real life Board of Directors.
There you have it. Thank you all for coming to Neopets church today. For all the sci-fi and fantasy writers out there, maybe we should all take a page out of the Neopets e-book when it comes to building worlds and fanatical fanbases. What do you think?
And if you have abandoned, hungry Neopets out there, it’s not too late. You could be a lucky data breach victim too. Go feed them!
“How did you know that 2/3 plain omelette is my favorite food?”
Madeleine Voge
*this market crash story is completely made up.