Neopets, the beloved virtual pet site that launched in 1999, announced a “new era” on Monday. The Neopets (TNT) team said it will launch a new “unified site” this week and fix some old Flash games shortly after, in a statement. Extensive blog post on Medium.
The new site, which launches on July 20th, will be a one-stop-shop for all brand advertising, links to our various games and products, a repository for Neopets articles and related links, and anything else Neopian you can think of! TNT says in the post. Neopets.com “I’m not going anywhere,” says TNT, but the team will give the site some “extra care” to fix some issues with the site, “including flash games.”
The team brings back some games by merging ruffle emulator For the now-defunct Adobe Flash, more than 50 games will be back starting July 25th. In the long term, “we hope to convert many of our beloved games to HTML5,” says TNT.
But you won’t just have old Neopets to look forward to; TNT also announces a new Neopets mobile game, Neopets world. TNT describes it as a “social life simulation game” where you play as a Neopet, and the game is set to be released next year, According to a video clip. TNT promises that the game will “not focus on cryptocurrency,” which may come as a relief to fans who didn’t like the brand’s foray into NFTs. TNT is also “moving away” from its own Neopets Metaverse gamewhich I will admit I didn’t know existed.
“The Neopets are equipped, for the first time in over a decade, to make meaningful changes in pursuit of the new renaissance”
The blog post also explains some of the organizational changes that led to the new direction. Neopets was under the management of JumpStart Games, but JumpStart “struggled to bring success to Neopets” and Closed Jun 30th. However, Dominic Law, who apparently played Neopets in the early 2000s, paid JumpStart’s parent company NetDragon to bail out Neopets before closing, and “a management takeover was struck” that allowed Neopets to operate as an independent company called World of He heads Neopia, Inc. Law’s new leadership team.
“The Neopets team, for the first time in over a decade, is equipped to make meaningful changes in pursuit of the neo-renaissance,” TNT says in the blog post. Moving forward, the team promises promising monthly updates, regular AMAs, and a brand ambassador program—the latter of which will launch in the “next couple of months.”
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