Neopets. You simply had to be there, in the early noughties where millions of players of all ages would log into the game to take care of their fantasy creatures, from Acaras, to JubJubs, to Yurbles. It's still going strong now, more than twenty years after the website launched, and its current team are interested in bringing it to brand new audiences on a brand new platform.
This article published to Washington Post centres on the loss of Adobe Flash, as a result of the discontinuation of support for the platform for many major web browsers. It's not an exaggeration to say that almost all of your favourite browser-based games and animations to play and watch in IT lessons relied on this important software to work properly, like 625 Sandwich Stacker, Badger Badger Badger, The Impossible Quiz, and the helicopter game. This collection also includes Neopets, and the team that runs the game did their best to ensure the website would be compatible without Flash before support ended on December 30th, 2020.
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Unfortunately, this placed a lot of stress on Neopets and threw spanners in the works of the annual winter celebrations which offer the community free gifts through an advent calendar. Players ran into numerous issues, airing their grievances on social media, and so JumpStart Games is allegedly aiming to transfer the classic browser-based world onto a new platform to iron out any future problems resulting from its longstanding foundations on the Internet.
"The Neopets team is thinking of bringing the game to the Nintendo Switch but declined to share further details," said Shannon Liao, one of the reporters who wrote the Washington Post piece on the legacy of Flash games. It's worth noting here that JumpStart has developed and released two Neopets games for mobile previously: Ghoul Catchers and Legends & Letters. These were sadly shut down last summer, and it's possible that this shift to the Switch might have partly motivated this choice.
Neopets on Switch would doubtlessly attract a lot of the present players, as well as encourage people who have nostalgia for the world of Neopia to return. But, when you don't log in to your Neopets account for some time, your digital pets look unwell and feel like you've abandoned them. So, there could also be some very distressing moments in the near future for a handful of millennials.
Featured Image Credit: JumpStartTopics: News, Retro Gaming