#016 Neopets is Digital Fashion's Roman Empire
How the free to play game shaped both digital fashion and our lives at large
This week I’m launching a new segment called thumbnail. As a complement to my technology deep dives, thumbnails are a shorter, more personalised, set of musings on the future of fashion and technology. If this sounds exciting please:
This week’s thumbnail was written from Berlin, whilst wearing a brown reptile-effect breastplate by Sssilk666 and crackle leather shorts from Voo Store.
The thumbnail
Last week I came face-to-face with my childhood at the heart of the Boros Collection.
Housed in a 30,000 square foot Nazi bunker, that briefly thrived as a fetish club, the collection hosts over 700 works by contemporary artists like Anna Uddenberg and He Xiangyu.
In the middle of the Boros’s largest room, sits a bulbous bust, sculpted from rich indigo bronze, gripping a bow and arrow. Balancing on one leg it gazes ecstatically at the tours trawling past, face contorted into an expression of unadulterated bliss.
Contrary to what you might think, this figure is no cupid. Rather it’s a 3 meter neopet, created by artist Bunny Rogers.
As 40% of neopet's 25 million users are under the age of 13, like many pre-teens, a distinct portion of my middle school mind was consumed with Neopia.1
Whilst my fixation on how to feed my JubJub waned as soon as I was allowed to make a Facebook account, when my career in digital fashion began, neopets won back mindshare.
Created in 1999, by college students Adam Powell and Donna Williams, neopets might seem like a simple game based on buying and breeding virtual animals. In reality, however, neopia is a rich and complex virtual world made up of interconnected web pages, elaborate economic systems, and pockets of the same user-generated, community-curated, content that defines social media today.
So as Coach becomes the latest brand to venture into Roblox, and Fendi sells out a Pokemon capsule at ~$1,500 per piece, it’s worth taking a long hard stare at the game that started it all.
The double click
In a 2021 essay for his blog
, analyses the 5 ways neopets foreshadowed our current consumer internet. Whilst Woodbury’s analysis is astute, I’d argue that neopets is even more prescient when it comes to digital fashion.Before I dive into my analysis, it's important to identify the behaviours that drive fashion— both in real life and in virtual spaces. As I explore in my essay Maslow and The Metaverse, fashion hinges on incentivising people to invest in their appearances for reasons of self-expression, affiliation and status. This demands an environment in which 1) appearance is socially significant, and 2) the tools to alter said appearance are readily available and both are found in neopia.
With its mix of avatar-based interactions, interest-driven networks, in-game economic systems and user generated content, neopets forged a world where digital fashion could thrive. It’s captive user-base, in turn, drove one of the first instances of commercialised gameplay, where brands such as McDonald’s and Nickelodeon invested in immersive advertising and digitally native IP, in much the same way luxury fashion players like Burberry and Balenciaga are doing today.
Double clicking on the 5 ways neopets foreshadowed today’s digital fashion landscape shows the game played a seminal part in normalising:
Avatar-based interactions — With 92 million accounts by the mid-2000s, neopets was one of the first avatar-centric social sims2 to reach mass popularity.
While today’s social media is most commonly associated with sharing curated content from real-life interactions, avatar-based socialising has long been shown to forge deep bonds. Chinese social network Soul, for example, has grown past 25 million users in under 10 years, on the premise that avatars allow users to feel more at ease connecting “freed from the pressure that comes with appearance, age, job, and income.”3
With this concept in mind, it should come as no surprise that in neopets, players connect to their avatars, not as just pets, but as proxies. And with players spending an average of 117 minutes per week immersed in neopia, the way these proxies’ look becomes deeply significant.
Digital fashion in neopia took many forms, the most obvious of which was players changing their pets appearance. Those with neopoints4 could buy clothes and accessories for their pets that varied in rarity, use special backgrounds, and even alter their neopet’s form through paintbrushes’(some of which still trade for millions in virtual cash!).
But that’s not all.
Snapshot of a table showing rare paintbrushes and their prices Few things signal the success of a market quite like illicit activity. And as neopia grew, a black market arose around improving a player’s personal brand — by pimping out their username — emerged.
As millions flocked to neopia, names like ‘Leo’ were quickly seen to be cooler than names like ‘leo82966647729X’ resulting in players spending thousands in cash on sites like eBay, to upgrade their username and flex.Interest-driven networks — As Woodbury explores, three elements that unite Instagram and TikTok with their predecessors (Facebook, Myspace), and upstart cousins (ClubHouse) are the abilities for users to 1) chat in forums 2) send direct messages and 3) create friend lists.
Four years before Myspace and over ten before Meta, all of these components were present on neopets. And, when coupled with unique interest groups called ‘guilds’, they deepened digital fashion’s importance.
Man is a social animal, and sometimes more social when he takes the form of a Cybunny. By providing the persistent presence of a group of impressionable others, neopia drove players to flex fits just as they would on TikTok today. And what the devs began the community continued.
Along with public message boards known as forums, a crucial element of neopia were guilds — small private groups built by users, not dissimilar to the Discord servers we use today.
Whilst any neopian could theoretically create a guild, guild entry was on an invite-only basis. And once a player was accepted into a guild they were expected to participate in ways that surpassed mere conversation. Neopian guilds were regularly seen banding together to buy collectibles, battle other pets and even rig the neopian stock market. And, when it came to fashion, they served to inject elements of taste into the way neopian’s chose their style.
Defined as ‘an individual's subjective desire for certain fashion elements based on their opinions and preferences’ taste marks the difference between a normal neopian choosing a name like ‘Brad’, and a Britney Spears guild member vying to get her hands on ‘Brit’.
These types of micro-community driven decisions, mirror how we make our fashion choices today. Where we elect social groups that mirror our interests, then align ourselves with micro influencers and trends that raise our status within these groups, rather than dressing for the world at large.In-game economic systems — A friend recently delighted me with the fact he’d bought his fashion-fanatic daughter Robux for Christmas. She’d had her heart set on two pricey virtual fits and preferred them to anything she could get at Saks or FAO Schwartz so he poured his cash into virtual spaces.
Neopet’s consumer preferences for participating in an in-game economy set the stage for the digital fashion market of today, which is estimated to total over $50bn USD at time of writing.
If you truly want to break your brain with neopian economics I’d advise you to read Claire Mcnear’s essay on how neopets seeded the Gamestop saga. But to cut a very long story short, while neopets began as a simple system where you’d work to earn neopoints to feed and customise your pets, it fast became a beast with its own rigged stock market, aggressive inflation, and most importantly in this case, financialised fits.
Whilst it’s common to find queues of grifting resellers camping outside Supreme every time a new collection drops, neopets was one of the first instances that this same dynamic was apparent in digital fashion.
Less than 10 years after neopets was founded, goods to customise both pets and profiles were being traded so aggressively that they were banned by eBay. Though some of these goods were acquired according to the games’ codes of conduct (via auctions or guilds) many were attained through far more nefarious methods.
One particularly enterprising group of techies coded scripts called autobuyers which instantly snapped up recently-released rare items from neopian shops. Another took advantage of a 2014 code bug which resulted in ‘dupe day’ — a week-long window within which neopians could duplicate and claim any items another player owned.User-generated content – As Jay Hoffman writes in
“what’s fascinating about all this (Neopets) is that none of this had to happen. The developers simply asked their users to raise pets and play some branded games.”
As I wrote in my last piece Brat as a Viral Playbook, the most durable brands are simultaneously built from the top-down and the bottom-up. Thus the fact that neopets was “created by Neopians through the connections that they forged” is indicative of the game possessing a powerful flywheel which drives longevity.
The two neopets founders were masters of what the crypto-crowd term ‘building in the open’. Both Powell and Williams posted Neopia updates biweekly on a news log translated into 10 different languages. Plus they set the stage for collective contribution via initiatives across education (providing HTML guides to inspire users to customise their profiles), publications (The Neopian Times allowed any neopian to pitch a story) and competitions (one contest where you could pitch ideas for new pet species saw Chrissy Tegan as a young winner!). And the same was seen when it came to fashion.
Alongside shopping, fashion-specific neopian tools allowed you to design custom clothes for your neopet. Those with style could gain neopoints via a popular Fashion Frenzy game (a precursor to Roblox’s #dresstoimpress contest) and neopets periodically ran competitions where players could submit neopet customization designs to have them sold in the neopian shops.Commercial considerations — as the saying goes, ‘if you build it they will come’. In this context ‘it’ refers to a virtual world with captive users and ‘they’ refers to mainstream brands.
In the first half of 2023, more than 350 brands had activated in virtual worlds like Roblox (Gucci), Fortnite (Balenciaga), Minecraft (Burberry) and ZEPETO (Christian Dior). Neopets paved the way for this mode of interaction via its immersive advertising model which seamlessly integrated brands into the neopian ecosystem.
Defined by Hoffman as something between product placement and sponsored content, neopets’ immersive ads were used by brands such as Cartoon Network and Disney. Drawing engagement from thousands of neopian’s per day, they took the form of games featuring popular characters, and permanent spaces where users could watch films and shows from the content houses.
But wait, there’s more.
Neopets x McDonalds Happy Meals from 2004 On top of engaging users with brands through in-game experiences, neopets was one of the first examples of brands leveraging in-game IP. The McDonald’s Happy Meals of 2004, and the Nickelodeon neopets TV show (cancelled) serve as the precursor to today’s fashion drops, where luxury brands reach new consumers by appealing to their deep bonds with online characters.
So far we’ve seen both Fendi and Tiffany collaborate with Pokemon, Louis Vuitton design the trophy and merch for League of Legends, Balenciaga partner on a IRL x virtual drop in Fortnite and Moschino design for The Sims.Zooming Out
Returning to the reason for this rabbit hole5 — the 3m bronze sculpture — the most crucial part of Bunny Roger’s artistic practice is her belief that her oeuvre began in childhood.
With sculptures inspired by neopia, and portraits based on Clone High, Rogers’ hyper-awareness of how the early internet has shaped her reality is something both fashion brands and consumers would be wise to note.
Whilst those who engage with neopia today number less than 100,000, the models neopets put into place have shaped platform’s like Roblox and Fortnite and seeded the next generation of internet-native consumers 60% of whom believe that the way they’re perceived virtually is more important than how they’re seen IRL.
So next time you find yourself face to face with a JubJub, regard it with respect.Additional Reading
The virtual world which neopets exist within
Social sims, short for social simulations, are a subgenre of life simulation games that explore social interactions between multiple artificial lives
Amanda Fan, head of marketing center at Soul for Jing Daily
Neopet’s in-game currency
No pun intended.