Twenty years on, specifics are hard to come by, but everybody interviewed for this story agrees on this: The system Neopets used to determine the stock prices each day was initially tied to player activity in some way.
“I ended up becoming a neomillionaire fairly quickly this way, and my friends saw me as some sort of neopoint baron.”įor some, merely becoming a neomillionaire wasn’t enough.
“As a fifth-grader, I had set up extensive spreadsheets in Excel to track Neodaq stock market prices daily so that I could pick up on stock patterns, and buy low, sell high,” says Neelou Etesami, a 29-year-old former Neopets player who is now studying biomedical science at graduate school. If it was a really big payday you were after, there was no better place to turn than that ultimate adult playground: the stock market, where players could buy shares of companies like Balthazar’s Faerie Bottling Inc., Cybun Electromatics, and Unis Beauty Salon, whose value rose and fell over time. (Following parental outcry, the site “ limited access to its roulette, blackjack, and slots to players 13 and over,” according to a 2005 story in Wired.)
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There were wheels you could pay to spin for the slim chance of winning a jackpot, plus slot machine and tombola giveaways. Alongside the match-three and pseudo- Tetris options, there were contests dependent on chance and built around gambling with the site’s in-game currency, neopoints. But many of the games weren’t exactly games, at least not in the sense of being something that you might find pre-installed in a school computer lab. If you once considered yourself a Neopian, it’s likely the games that you remember best: the Snake-esque thrill of Meerca Chase, the falling cones of Ice Cream Machine, the conspicuously branded corporate partnerships like McDonald’s: Meal Hunt, which at the time raised eyebrows for the use of then-novel immersive advertising-a phrase that Neopets trademarked. How ‘Animal Crossing’ May Have Informed the GameStop Stock Rush The GameStop Stock Market Saga Explainer Dictionary
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And there was plenty of discussion about a most untweenly obsession: how to become a millionaire. With 40 percent of users under the age of 13 and another 40 percent between 13 and 18, many of those early-aughts passions were what you might expect: The Lord of the Rings and Britney Spears were common themes one guild called “In the middle (school that is)!!!!!” described itself thusly, “Need a help line? One for homework, school, dating, sports, and other stuff as well (even parents)? Well then, this is the guild for you!” Some players swapped tips about the site’s beloved Flash games and how to make personal pages colorful and expressive. But with its emphasis on forums, direct messages, and friend lists, Neopets was an inherently chatty, communal place-in other words, a social network, and a massive one at that.īy 2000, Neopets was dotted with guilds-small, private groups that users could join to chat about shared interests. In the site’s early years, The Guardian dubbed it “ an online hybrid of Pokémon and Tamagotchi,” which made sense: Like its fellow ’90s sensations with similarly youthful fan bases, its central conceit was that a player would adopt and care for digital pets. Neopets, the then-fledgling digital pet website, had rapidly become a hit following its 1999 launch: Just two years later, the site was celebrating 14 million accounts by 2005, that number had climbed to 92 million.
The one on the website Neopets, where in the heady days of 2000 trouble had broken out on the Neodaq stock exchange. Lindsey DeSilvio was 11 years old when she realized that the stock market might be rigged.