What happened to Neopets? Is it still around?

By Obscure Internet 26 Oct 2026 10 min read

Neopets never shut down. The virtual pet site that launched in November 1999 is still running in 2026, owned since 2023 by World of Neopia, Inc., an independent company formed when the people running Neopets bought it from its Chinese owner, NetDragon.

So if you’re wondering whether the Kacheek you abandoned in Year 8 is still out there: it may well be. If it is, it’s probably hungry. The longer answer takes in a British couple living on credit cards, a $160 million sale, a cereal aisle built into a fantasy world, the death of Flash and a short, unloved detour into NFTs.

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What are Neopets?

Neopets is a website where you adopt and look after virtual pets. You pick a species (a Kacheek, an Aisha, a Lupe, a Kougra and dozens more), choose a colour and a name, and from then on it’s your job to keep your pet fed, happy and, if you’re that way inclined, dressed in something ridiculous.

From the museum

The pets live in Neopia, a fantasy world split into themed lands such as Mystery Island and Terror Mountain. You earned Neopoints, the local currency, by playing games, and spent them on food, toys, books and the much-wanted Faerie Paintbrushes. You could run your own shop, read books to make your pet cleverer, or send it to fight in the Battledome. In 2005, Wired described one 11-year-old who spent two hours a day there, saving for a bigger house for his baby dragon.

Underneath the cute pets sat a proper economy. In 2015, Motherboard put it well: to play Neopets “was to see your time as money, and every activity was woven into the Neopian economy”. A lot of us learnt about supply and demand from restocking a shop, long before anyone taught it at school.

When did Neopets come out, and who made it?

Neopets launched in November 1999. That makes it 26 years old, and it turns 27 next month.

It was made by Adam Powell and Donna Williams, a young British couple who’d met at school in Surrey. Powell had left college in Nottingham to start an online advertising agency, which mostly meant making banner ads for his dad’s hot-water-bottle company. The pair had a houseful of real pets and an idea: a fantasy pet site so addictive that people would happily put up with the ads to visit it. “We thought virtual pets was a good idea,” Powell told Wired, “because people would get attached and keep coming back.”

Living on credit cards, Powell wrote the code and Williams, then an art student, did the design. It was very British and quite silly. You could feed your pet a Pan Galactic George Slushie, a nod to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and one early creature was simply a picture of Bruce Forsyth in his bow tie. (Later, Bruce was redrawn as a small blue penguin. He kept the bow tie.)

It worked. By Christmas 1999, Wired reported, the site was getting 600,000 page views a day, and the couple were running out of money. In January 2000 the market research businessman Doug Dohring and his team bought the company, and Neopets moved to Los Angeles.

Why was Neopets full of adverts?

Because that was the business. Dohring’s company called it “immersive advertising” and trademarked the phrase. Instead of banners down the side, the adverts were part of the world.

Wired’s 2005 tour of Neopia found a Cereal Adventure zone where the Trix rabbit and the Cocoa Puffs cuckoo had houses on the hillside, a Lucky Charms game that paid out Neopoints, branded games for McDonald’s, Nestlé and Goldfish crackers, and a Disney Theater showing trailers. You could earn Neopoints by filling in market research surveys from the home page. The Japanese site in 2004 was offering 300 Neopoints a survey.

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It went the other way too. Neopets turned up in Happy Meals, and the Neopets Trading Card Game, made by Wizards of the Coast, put a Virtual Prize Code in every booster pack, good for a chance at exclusive virtual items on the website. Not everyone was charmed. The editor of the advertising watchdog magazine Adbusters told Wired the site was “recruiting them into consumer culture”. But it made Neopets very valuable.

By 2005, Wired reported, Neopets had 25 million members, ran in 10 languages and served more than 2.2 billion page views a month. Four in five members were under 18. Members spent an average of 6 hours and 15 minutes a month there, which Media Metrix said made it the second-stickiest site on the internet, ahead of Yahoo!, MSN, AOL and eBay.

Who owns Neopets now?

World of Neopia, Inc. owns Neopets, and its chief executive is Dominic Law. Getting there took six owners in 24 years.

1. Powell and Williams (1999): the founders ran it from Britain for its first couple of months.
2. Doug Dohring’s Neopets, Inc. (2000): the investment that moved it to Los Angeles and built the advertising machine.
3. Viacom (2005): in June 2005 the owner of MTV and Nickelodeon bought Neopets for $160 million, and Nickelodeon’s president took charge of the brand. “We want to be wherever kids are,” he told Wired. “And there are plenty of kids at Neopets.”
4. JumpStart (2014): Viacom sold Neopets in March 2014 to JumpStart, a Los Angeles maker of educational games. Moving the site to new technology was, in the words of its chief executive, “a bit bumpy at times”, and in early March 2015 a number of long-serving staff were let go.
5. NetDragon (2017): in July 2017 the Chinese games company NetDragon Websoft bought JumpStart, and Neopets came with it. PocketGamer.biz put Neopets at more than 75 million users.
6. World of Neopia (2023): as NetDragon wound down JumpStart, which closed at the end of June 2023, Law, who’d been working on Neopets inside NetDragon since 2020, persuaded NetDragon to sell him the game with the backing of outside investors. Decrypt called it a management buyout that made Neopets independent for the first time in 18 years.

By 2005 Warner Bros was developing a Neopets film. The Viacom years brought a PlayStation 2 game and a NeoCash Mall, opened in 2007, where you could spend real money on virtual items. Players were outraged when it turned out some of those items gave an advantage in the game.

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What happened to the Neopets NFTs?

In 2021, still under NetDragon, Neopets launched a collection of NFTs and started work on a crypto game called Neopets Metaverse. Fans hated it. A #NoNeoNFTs campaign started, and The Verge likened the whole thing to fracking your childhood memories. In July 2023, with new owners in charge, the game was cancelled and the team said it would put the money into a game “more in line with what the community has been asking for”.

What happened to the Neopets games when Flash died?

Most of them broke. Neopets’ games and many of its interactive corners were built in Flash, and when Flash came to an end (Adobe stopped supporting it on 31 December 2020 and blocked it from running on 12 January 2021), the games that hadn’t been rebuilt in HTML5 stopped working. If you’d spent the years before clicking past the grey Flash Player is blocked box, you’d seen it coming.

The fix came in July 2023, when the new owners started using Ruffle, a Flash emulator that plays old Flash files in a modern browser. Game Developer reported more than 50 old games coming back, with Snowmuncher and Turmac Roll among the first to work properly. By September 2023 Neopets said more than 100 minigames were playable again. Law later said that when the clean-up began, only about a dozen were.

Not everything was fixed. “Half of the site is still broken,” Law told Game Developer at GDC in March 2024, talking about the Flash-era corners that NetDragon had never restored.

Can you still play Neopets?

Yes. Neopets.com is free, and the main game is still the website: adopt a pet, play the games, earn Neopoints, run a shop. If you can remember your old username and password, there’s a good chance your old account is still there. “If players can dig up their old logins,” Game Developer wrote in 2024, “their Neopets are waiting for them (and are probably very hungry).”

As for the classic games, the place to play them is Neopets itself:

• On the website: the restored games, such as Snowmuncher and Turmac Roll, are on Neopets.com, free with an account, running through Ruffle.
• On consoles and PC: Neopets: Mega Mini Games Collection, a paid compilation of 25 or so classic minigames plus a story mode, came out on 26 March 2026 for Switch, PlayStation and PC, and you can link it to your Neopets account. PlayStation LifeStyle’s review in April 2026 found plenty of nostalgia, but said “even the best of these minigames isn’t particularly good”. Some fans pointed out that most of the games are free on the website anyway.

Copies of the games on other people’s websites aren’t official, and we don’t link to them.

Is Neopets still active, and do people still play it?

It is, and they do. It’s a smaller crowd than in 2005, but a loyal one, and it’s been growing again. Neopets said in September 2023 that its traffic had hit a five-year peak that July, and that monthly active users were up 60% since the change of ownership. Law said in 2024 that revenue, viewers and engagement were at a seven-year peak, though he also admitted the game had run at a loss for the previous decade.

Plenty of today’s players are the same people who played as children, and that generation is only now starting to have children of its own. Law told Game Developer he thinks younger players can treat it “like a living, historical relic. You can treat it as a museum.” We’d agree, obviously.

Is Neopets down?

Not for good. Neopets goes down from time to time like any old website, and “Is Neopets down again?” was already a familiar Reddit question in 2015, when Motherboard wrote about slow pages and bugs that had gone unfixed. The site hasn’t closed, so if it won’t load, you’ve hit an outage, not an ending.

Did Neopets shut down?

No, though it came close to the edge more than once. In 2015, after the JumpStart layoffs, there were rumours on forums that the site was closing, and JumpStart’s chief executive had to promise Motherboard, “We are absolutely continuing with the site!” When NetDragon closed JumpStart in 2023, Neopets could easily have gone with it. Instead it was bought by the people running it.

Neopets’ little sister wasn’t so lucky. Petpet Park, a spin-off from 2008, was closed soon after JumpStart took over, at short notice.

Is Neopets coming back?

It never left, but it is having a comeback. Since 2023 the new owners have fixed games, run question-and-answer sessions with players, and brought back a Neopets trading card game. In July 2023 they also announced a mobile life-sim game called World of Neopets. In July 2026 an Aisha even turned up in Fortnite as a sidekick, for 1,500 V-Bucks.

It sits in the same corner of the internet as Habbo Hotel, another 2000s world that simply never closed, and unlike Club Penguin, which Disney switched off in 2017.

Neopets: a timeline

• November 1999: Adam Powell and Donna Williams launch Neopets from Britain.
• Christmas 1999: the site reaches 600,000 page views a day.
• January 2000: Doug Dohring’s team buys the company, and Neopets moves to Los Angeles.
• 2004: a premium version without banner ads launches, and the Wizards of the Coast card game is in shops, with prize codes for the website.
• June 2005: Viacom buys Neopets for $160 million.
• 2007: the NeoCash Mall opens, selling virtual items for real money.
• March 2014: Viacom sells Neopets to JumpStart.
• March 2015: JumpStart lets long-serving Neopets staff go, and promises the site isn’t closing.
• July 2017: NetDragon buys JumpStart, and Neopets with it.
• December 2020 to January 2021: Adobe ends Flash, and many Neopets games stop working.
• 2021: Neopets launches NFTs, and fans push back.
• June 2023: NetDragon closes JumpStart.
• July 2023: a management buyout makes World of Neopia the owner, and the NFT game is cancelled.
• September 2023: more than 100 minigames are playable again through Ruffle.
• 26 March 2026: Neopets: Mega Mini Games Collection comes out on consoles and PC.
• July 2026: an Aisha arrives in Fortnite.

Wander back through the Messenger Years for the rest of the 2000s, or on to the Playground Years, where the browser games kept going long after Neopets’ first owners had cashed out.

From the museum