Neopets is coming back bigger and better than ever | Hacker News Reader

Neopets is coming back bigger and better than ever

buzzfeed.com

When I was 15, so.... like 1997? Whatever. I had been writing PHP for a year and was having a bad time at school and life in general and I applied for a job at NeoPets and got through all the interviews and got a $150,000 offer with a relocation package to SF. I was living with my parents in Washington state. They never asked how old I was and I had an orientation call with the HR lady and they were so excited to hire me. Video calls were not really a thing then. After the HR call I walked out of my bedroom and told my mother I had solved all of my problems and was moving to California and she said "WHAT! No you aren't!". Looking back, this disconnect should have maybe been diagnostic criteria for ASD. Lol.

I no showed to the job, obviously.

I did not get another comparable pay package till well into my 30s.

That's an incredible story. How do you (and your mom) feel about it today? Do you wish you had taken the job? Does she?

Yeah. Small town kid with undiagnosed brain problems with a 1997 $150,000 salary. I'd never had more than a few hundred dollars to my name before. For sure my life would be very different but it's pretty hard to say what would have happened to me.... but it probably would have been a dangerous mess knowing the route I've had to take through the world to get to some self awareness. It's fun to think about though.

I'll have to ask my mom. We really haven't spoken about it since. I wouldn't be surprised if she completely forgot that happened. My memory from that time.... there was so much going on for me and not much of it good... yeah. My memory is spotty. I'll have to ask her and get the adult version of how that affected them. I guess I did get in front of a judge and became an emancipated minor that year and sold my first PHP contract. I think that was the result? What a stupid life.

Was just about to ask about emancipation. By the way, what was the interview like in 1997? No leetcode I'm assuming...

At that time if you could upload PHP code to an FTP and it connected to a mySQL database you were a pretty rare animal. I mean, this is not long after PHP became a thing at all. Most important stuff was Java or Perl out there on the web. I also was very handy with photoshop, HTML, and cut up and layout. I've always kind of been visual first. I don't think I became a "good" programmer until I was in my late 20s but I've always had a bit of an edge in that I have natural design instincts and an inability to fully recognize that I can't do something.

Anyway, it was pretty easy to demonstrate that I had the chops for what they were looking for by showing them my websites on the internet and talking about my code. The insane treadmill of javascript frameworks was still a decade away. I still can't white board code any algorithms but to quote Rasmus Lerdorf (creator of PHP) "Yes, I am a terrible coder, but I am probably still better than you :)"

I know in our current culture this experience I'm describing could be seen as a good thing or some sort of mythmaking. It's not. It's a failure of the school and social system to take care of a distressed gifted kid.

EDIT: I just remembered that I started with Macromedia Flash before I got into PHP. I didn't understand what vector art was though so I made stuff with Paint Shop Pro and when things scaled they would be all jaggy. Lol. I think that was the real bullet for Neopets. That not only could I post a form to a database but I had flash chops... Wow. I have not thought about how much time I spent working in flash in a looooong time. I should see if I can find any of those works in my archives. I can only half remember two animations. I bet there is some fun stuff.

I suspect you have your story mixed up. Neopets wasn’t created until Nov 1999, didn’t have non-founder staff til the following year, and HQ was always in LA (actually Glendale) not SF.

Yeah. It's been a loooong time. I was an emancipated minor at 15. I did get a job at neopets at the height of the dot com boom and I did not end up going. Maybe I sold that PHP job and got emancipated and then the neopets thing happened because it was really hard to be a kid building websites for small local businesses. eh. It's not a thing I've thought about much at all in the last 20 years. When I see neopets in the news though I am always still very impressed that they survived the dot com crash and are still around.

For sure at the time I had no concept of the difference between any California cities. I guess over time LA turned into SF in my head because what tech comes out of LA that isn't for the movies? I actually ended up taking a job in LA about eight years ago and it was hilarious hearing people talk about Silicon Beach like anyone was writing code out there and it wasn't just a content farm. LA is a tomb. Changing that detail in my memory and now knowing both cities, yeah. That job for sure would have killed me before my 18th birthday.

It sounds like your information is accurate and from wikipedia or whatever. So putting that together that they probably just started when they hired me also makes sense for how they signed a contract with a child.

Hmm.

> That job for sure would have killed me before my 18th birthday.

Is it a bad place to work?

https://web3isgoinggreat.com/single/neopets-shuts-down-its-n...

> After announcing a Neopets Metaverse project — complete with NFT collections and two different crypto tokens — in 2021, Neopets has announced they will be "transition[ing] away from the Neopets Metaverse game and redistribut[ing] those resources to the development of a game that we feel can better reflect our values and vision." The announcement came along with an announcement that the company had raised $4 million, and undergone a major change in leadership. They reassured their community that its new project, "World of Neopets", will not have any NFTs and "is NOT built on a crypto model".

Thank goodness. Web3 was, at least in the last few years, little more that a meme reliant on very cheap money due to ahistorically low interest rates. The sort of thing that only proliferates after it's been so long since the last recession that everyone forgot the value of money.

I was going to mention this as well. I am of the demographic squarely aimed at the NeoPets revival (late millenials/early gen-z) and not a single person I know views NeoPets in a good light after they tried to pivot to NFTs.

I'm sure not everyone holds the same views as my friends and I, but I know they burned a LOT of good will trying to make a quick buck.

I hope this nft/ cryptocurrency think is over. It’s been over a decade now.

I don't like it at all (it isn't 'decentralized' when the content is on a centralized server), but when I think really hard on it neither do I like stuff like Panini, MtG, and FIFA. Ultimately, the RNG is just massively unfair due to sheer greed. If you'd have say three token rarities, common worth 0,05 USD, uncommon 0,20 USD, and rare 0,50 USD you're talking about values which are OK for kids. You'd get the rare one you like for 0,50 USD and you're good to go. Maybe you collect a couple more. But its optional, they're all affordable, you could give a barbie NFT as present and its a small present (heck, it IS a small/minor thing). That's not how it works though. The prices are through the roof and they want rich kids to be whales they can suck dry, and they'll feel special with their unique rarity other kids cannot or do not want to afford. They think they look cool, and if it gives power (like Messi, Ronaldo, or Black Lotus) then it isn't about skill anymore (uneven playing field). In short, the issue isn't merely NFTs (the 'decentralized' marketing hype is a scam within itself); it is bad RNG/odds. Which existed in casinos and fruit machines way before FIFA, MtG, Panini or any NFT existed.

When the hype is dead is when it'll have just begun.

For many, it will be "over" - mostly the grifters and opportunists in the space.

I remember that Neopets used to have a game called the 'Wheel of Monotony,' which was a chance wheel that would spin for like two hours before it landed on something.

When my mom saw that it was running on the PC with no one watching it, she thought that it could be hacking us and shut it off. As a kid, obviously I thought that she was overreacting.

Since then I've realized that if you wanted to run a script on someone's machine for a long time without being interrupted, a game like that would be a great way to do it.

"huh this wheel sure is giving my GPU a workout!"

I credit Neopets with the reason I have my degree and career.

There were many places on the site that let you inject your own HTML/CSS into the page to customize the appearance. I did this basically all through high school learning the in and outs of graphic design and front end development. It's the reason I knew really early on what I wanted to do and gave myself a clear goal.

A few years ago, I was able to get my old, old account back (2004). Some of my pages and code were still there. It was a treat to see them again! Oh and the actual pets too I guess...

Same, they even had tutorials for writing html and css! I referenced them often.

Same here! My introduction to programming was trying to customize my Neopets shop, creating graphics in MS Paint, making little "blogs" to share with friends. In reminiscing, I just found this page https://www.neopets.com/shopblogs.phtml and wow I don't think it's changed at all in 20 years (spiffy text!). Haven't thought about Neopets in so long, it's bringing back so many fond memories.

BRB while I take a break from my mundane corporate software job to try and get back my old account/childhood. :')

Great. NeoPets was the best environment to hone hacking skills. Modern Infosec students can use the new site to test out XSS attacks. Nothing says early 00s nostalgia like executing code on peoples browsers and sql injection.

Yeah! I was a "neopian hacker" as a young teen (my handle was "idiotproof"). It got me into the industry and taught me more about browser environments & PHP/SQL than I'd ever have learned from any book.

I was obsessed with Neopets as a kid. I even got the PS2 game for my birthday, which came with a rare card, which gave me a rare paintbrush that I sold on my store.

I very much miss browser-based games. In the mid-2000s I think I played just about all of them, including the classics like Kingdom of Loathing.

It's been years since I've played any browser-based games - I've been thinking about making one for fun for a while now.

Probably my first intro to software was from the Potato Counter game in Neopets. All you do in the game is count the number of potatoes on screen, input the number of potatoes, and, if you were correct, you get awarded some Neopoints. Well, depending on your input you get sent to either `/win` or `/lose`, so you cN just guess any number and charge the url to `/win` and $$$

Is it still going to be run by Scientologists?

Cite: https://www.avclub.com/beloved-early-internet-website-neopet...

Answer appears to be no:

> Lest this sour your view of Neopets in retrospect, sentient Twitter thread Chrissy Teigen is here to help you cope. In an effort to recall what it was she loved about the game—which was sold to Viacom in 2005 and subsequently relieved of its Org Board methods—in the wake of the article’s reveal, Teigen dove back into the land Neopia...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com