If you’re like me, you spent most of your childhood days surfing the pound and hoping the Fountain Faerie would pop up. If that sentence means absolutely nothing to you, you probably didn’t spend much time on Neopets.
Most people knew Neopets as a Tamagotchi-like website, but it was so much more than just feeding pixels on a computer screen. It was one of the early, youth-friendly digital third spaces—a way to meet like-minded ‘90s kids, express your creativity, and build the beginnings of core gamer skills that pushed so many of us towards a lifelong love for gaming. And for that last one, you can specifically thank the Neopets Game Room, a collection of Flash games that tracked scores on a leaderboard and handed out Neopoints that could be spent on pets.
