★ my neopets story ★
In 2005, I remember falling asleep on the sofa and waking up to my mother showing me a tiny red plush toy. It was a Lupe. It was from the line of neopets toys being given out by mcdonalds at the time. I remember being so fascinated by the neopets.com tag on it (the internet was very cool and exciting back then as a child.) since we didn't have a computer, I ended up going to my neighbours house and finding my way to neopets.com on the old slow dial-up internet. I remember my mother and neighbour standing over my shoulder helping me enter details and create my first virtual pet. I loved dogs and wolves at the time, and of course the red lupe plushie, so my first pet was a red lupe creatively named LupLupe with a bunch of numbers after it. I then went onto create 3 more Lupe's of different colours. I also remember being obsessed with destruct-o-match, playing at my mother's house, staring at the loading screen which moved achingly slow.
That's all I remember until 2009. I played a lot of Neopets in '09-'10 mostly with my friend Ramona. she got me interested in collecting avatars but I was mostly focused on saving up for a baby paintbrush for my kougra. we used to play neopets games every day after school, determined to get those avvies. I remember how much we used to stress over particularily difficult ones like hungry skeith, seeing who could win it first... lol. It makes me laugh now but it felt so serious at the time. we even got into arguments over MSN about it. this was also around the time I learnt HTML on neopets, having a great time trying out all the custom backgrounds and lookups. I was in awe of the page of a pet named dhevil, they were so cool! I dreamed of being able to code like that someday...
I played neopets on and off since then. my friend ramona and I drifted apart, life happened... I can't remember when I really got back into it yet again, perhaps around 2018 or so. I finally learnt how to make a ton of neopoints and painted my kougra with the baby paintbrush. In 2023 I ended up achieving all of my neopets-related childhood goals, including that hungry skeith avatar! finally.
neopets means a lot to me. I will always carry the memory of it with me, long after the site shuts down.
I still have the little red lupe from 2005 that started it all.