Neostalgia

by Emily Polson

My Neopets have been dying for ten years. I forgot the password to my account and the associated email address no longer exists, so my colorful pixelated friends are stuck in a prolonged state of suffering.

I signed up under the username “emily9065” at age eight, and for a while my Neopets lived well. Every day after finishing my homework, I clicked over to Neopia’s Tyrannian Plateau, a prehistoric town home to a Giant Omelette users can visit to claim a slice, which I duly fed to my pets. Every December, I dropped by Happy Valley to pick up treats and items from the Advent Calendar. I earned Neopoints by selling surplus food in my shop “the fyora place” (named for the Queen of Faerieland), going on quests, and playing Meerca Chase, a spoof of the arcade game Snake featuring a squirrel-like pet collecting neggs (Neopet eggs). I wanted to earn enough to buy a Faerie Paint Brush, a rare item that would give one of my Neopets a pair of wings after a visit to the Rainbow Pool.

Most of my internet usage now revolves around passive consumption, and when I do post, it’s with the cynical understanding that what I’m creating is a curated “personality resume.” Even when interacting with friends on Twitter and Instagram, the level of engagement is low. But Neopets was a place of community and skill-building. I learned basic HTML to code my pet’s webpages with different colored text and backgrounds, turning them into a series of personal websites and guides where I shared my Neopets knowledge with fellow users. I joined a “guild,” which was their term for a social hub with a private forum. Because I was under thirteen, my father had to fax a parental permission form to the Neopets office so I could be allowed to post. For a while I was in a guild called IcePop, then I later became a high-ranking member in “Splash-Neo,” where I served my community by designing an activities hub on Florenna the Wocky’s pet page and awarding prizes for various levels of involvement in the group.

Whenever I left the site for too long—family vacation, summer camp, or loss of computer privileges—my pets’ status would fall from hungry to very hungry to famished to starving to dying. When I returned, I’d buy cheap junk food and feed them until they were sated. Unlike Tamagotchis, Neopets—it seems—will live forever. And unlike Club Penguin, Dungeon Runners, and two-hundred plus other MMOGs (massively multiplayer online games) whose servers have shuttered since they went out of vogue, the Neopets site uncannily clings to existence, a monument to online life during the early aughts. Before social media emerged to center performing the self to a mostly familiar set of followers, virtual worlds like Neopets gave users a place for play.

My once vibrant guild grew defunct as our quorum of amateur coders and tween moderators got bored of the maintenance. Entering high school, I logged on less and less, and then not at all. It wasn’t until college, during one of those wistful conversations about childhood, that I realized I no longer could. My username still appeared in the public search, though, so my friends and I visited my old profile and dying pets’ personal web pages to see an internet graveyard: fragments of broken code and error messages where an image embedded from Photobucket had been taken down from the host site. This nostalgia trip became a yearly event for nearly a decade, wherein I’d lament my inability to relive the Y2K glory days with my old NFT-like friends.

Then at 27, after successfully convincing a customer service rep to refund my money for a stolen package, it occurs to me that there must be a solution for almost any problem staffed by a human on the other side. After nearly ten years of exile, I submit a help request to Neopets HQ explaining my predicament, and a support rep named Lilith hooks me up with a temporary key to the magical land and the URL for a password reset.

Once back in, I head straight to Tyrannia to retrieve my daily slice of the Giant Omelette. It’s strawberry flavored, no one’s favorite, but my dying pets will take what they can get. GIGGLE_IGGLE the Ogrin takes a bite and moves up to starving status, telling me I’m the “best owner ever!” I feed Ballet_Baby and Florenna, too, but by the time I get to mystery_island_aloha—the Quiggly painted “cloud” color that I adopted from the pound—the omelette is finished. I visit the Neopian Fresh Foods store in Neopia Central, where I haggle down the price for orange chicken, a chocolate milkshake, and mashed potatoes with gravy, and mystery_island_aloha gets first dibs. Once all my pets are up to famished, I’m out of Neopoints, and also, in the real world, I have to go to work. I swear I’ll be back to feed them later, and I am.

I go looking for Meerca Chase, but the game is down due to the discontinuation of Adobe Flash, so I play several rounds of Destruct-O-Match, Faerie Bubbles, and Hasee Bounce instead. The infrastructure of the internet may have changed, but old Reddit forums still offer hacks for how to find cheap food on the marketplace, tips I use to feed my pets a series of eggplant-looking vegetables called Ummagines until they’re full. I’ve done it. I’m a good Neo-mom. But I’m exhausted, and now I have to feed myself; the eggplant in my fridge isn’t going to salt and roast itself.

The next day my pets are hungry again. The cycle of consumption repeats: earning fake money, buying fake food, feeding my fake pets. What was fun as a kid suddenly feels too much like real life, the mind-numbing ceaselessness of day-to-day care work, a reminder that we’re all dying; we’re born dying, and no matter how much we eat, we’ll eventually be hungry again. I miss the days when responsibility itself was pretend.

Meandering the site on a hunt for novelty leads me to an antiquated view of the account page that says, “None of your Neofriends are currently online. You must be lonely.” I scroll through the list and don’t recognize half the usernames: “2cute4u98789,” “chokat0,” “dumdidleynd”—who are these people? After following broken links to where my old guilds should’ve been, I log off and lose interest.

A few days later, though, I want to show the account to my boyfriend, who’s been locked out of his own for over a decade, too. My pets are probably dying again, I tell him, even though I fed them till they were very bloated not that long ago. I open my phone’s browser so he can see GIGGLE_IGGLE’s sad face for himself. But I’ve once again forgotten my password.

We resort to looking up my public profile page. I stare at the frowning, forsaken pets, and try to comfort myself with the knowledge that they’ll live on without me—at least until the mysterious and omniscient developer behind the whole operation flips off the switch.

Time passes. If the Brain Tree falls in the Haunted Woods and there’s no one around to hear it, can a pixelated pet feel pain? Am I Victor Frankenstein, running away from my own needful creation?

I’m thirty-one now, scrolling Instagram, desperate for dopamine, willingly subjecting myself to the psychology of intermittent reward, creating value for Meta shareholders as they auction off my attention to advertisers, when I see a sponsored post for Neopets. I click over to the profile. Your Neopets are dying! says their bio. Feed them 👇

But there is no there there online anymore. You can’t go home again. I will never outlive this hunger.

Emily Polson is a book editor and Pushcart-nominated writer whose work has appeared in HAD, Pidgeonholes, Salt Hill Journal, and elsewhere. She is pursuing an MFA at the City College of New York, where she also teaches first-year writing.