neocuisine
yes we're talking about neopets again
(a quick note: this is the second in a mini series of newsletters I’m writing looking at my favourite elements of the unique art and design of Neopets—check out the first instalment below if you want to read more!)
This November, the equal parts infamous and iconic virtual pets website Neopets.com is celebrating its twenty fifth birthday.
Neopets and I were born in the same year—1999—and while I would consider 25 to be a pretty cool/youthful a/normal age for a human person1, for a website it feels absolutely ancient! For reference, the first website only goes back to 1991, while the search engine project that became Google was first created in 1996. Neopets is a relic of the early days of the internet age.
Recently, I’ve found myself back on the site as it celebrates this anniversary to check out some of the new in-game content and events. I’m gathering limited edition items purely because of the fact that they are limited edition. I have no use for these things, not in the game and certainly not outside of it, but I feel like I need them, like the tiny pixels of the new avatar I’ve unlocked or the special paintbrush I’ve collected are somehow validating the time I’m spending/wasting as I find myself delving back into the world of Neopia.
But what is it about these in-game items that makes them such a source of fascination? There’s undeniably an element of nostalgia to it, the way that this game reminds me of being a kid and spending hours on the family computer raising funds in the neopian bank for a rare item or haggling with other users on the Neoboards or trading post for something I wanted to give my pets. There is also something weirdly compelling about the in game economics of Neopia, where shifting inflation rates, a virtual stock market, and various user schemes over the years have caused the economy to fluctuate in genuinely interesting ways and change the value of money and items. The rarity system in the game, the existence of limited edition, special, and discontinued items, and other elements make the economy and the trade of items even more complex and engaging.
Most of all, however, the enduring unique aesthetic of Neopets—which can be seen clearly in these items—is what makes its virtual ephemera so desirable. The sense of material culture is an essential part of the game, and its design helps to tell the story of Neopia and bring users into its fantastic world.
If there is one type of item which exemplifies this capacity best, it would be food.
Neopets foods—and there are over 10,000 consumable food items on the site—provide essential worldbuilding, connecting users to a sense of place in each region of the game as cultural artefacts and feeding the sensory imagination through a range of disgusting and delicious images and descriptions.
Let’s look at a few of the foods that are integral to the world of Neopets!
One of Neopia’s most important food sources is the Giant Omelette, located in the pre-historic desert plateaus of Tyrannia. The Giant Omelette, so the story goes, was first made from the enormous egg of a dinosaur, and each day every user on the site is permitted to visit the omelette and claim a slice. The slices come in a plethora of flavours(cheese and onion, veggie delight, and black currant are just a few), some rarer than others, and provide three servings of food to Neopets. The omelette is replenished daily, but can run out, so some days a player might visit it only to find that the entire thing has already been eaten.
In the eternally frozen, polar region of Terror Mountain, slushies in just about any flavour you can imagine are for sale, and fascinatingly some of the flavours are represented not as a still image, but as an animated one that vibrates or dances around? These slushies are a quintessentially Neopian food, taking elements of real world foods remixed with strange flavours and quirky twists.
At the top of the mountain peak is the Super Happy Icy Fun Snow Shop, which has all kinds of icy foods, from the more conventional(ice creams and ice lollies) to the absurd(snowghetti and meatballs).
Throughout the world, there are a huge variety of imaginary fruits which can be purchased and eaten on their own or found in all kinds of cuisine. The list of these is too long to go into but you can check them out in this user made gallery. Many of them are also regionally specific and places like Brightvale have special farms that can be visited in the game, once again contributing to the sense of place and a rich material culture throughout Neopets.
Borovan is one of Neopia’s most curious consumables. Often seen around the winter holidays(and specifically in connection to the game’s annual advent calendar event), borovan is a mysterious hot chocolate adjacent beverage, inexplicably made of asparagus? No further comment.
mmm borovan Finally is perhaps the most iconic Neopets food: jelly. Found in all forms on the site, it comes from a secret realm often said to be a myth which cannot be found on the world map, Jelly World. Here, everything is made of jelly, and those who are able to find this hidden area can visit the giant jelly(much like the giant omelette) once per day to get free jelly to feed to their pets.
While there are so many worse, and much more genuinely bizarre or disgusting foods that can be found in the game, jelly is one I personally have always found very weird. Maybe its the use of the term “jelly”—the British English found throughout the site led some names to be very confusing for me when I played the game as a child2 — maybe its the fact that its not something I would really eat in the real world, but to this day, weird gelatinous foods are always something that I associate with this Neopian obsession.
Food items really lend Neopets a sense of lived-in reality for players, in particular because they are so interactive. Food can be fed to Neopets, who grow more and more hungry over time unless frequently fed, and correlate directly to a Neopet’s status including health effects(such as illness), mood, hunger state(the worst possible state of hunger a Neopet can have is “dying”, which gives feeding them a real sense of importance and urgency!). Their reactions to different foods also provide a real sense of engagement, as pets will express their preferences for different things. Feeding and food items are one of the essential ways that a Neopet relates to the player, and through which a sense of responsibility and care for these virtual pets is developed. Just as real world food and food cultures can give us so many insights and tell so many stories, the same is true in fictional worlds like Neopia, where culinary worldbuilding gives us a taste of the fantasy imaginary.
That does it for this week’s silly newsletter update!! I’ll be back with you soon for more on: some new art! holiday mysteries! the year in review! and much more. Thanks as always for reading cloudtopia, it means more to me than winning at Fruit Machine(real Neopets heads will know that means a LOT) :-)
Until next time,
isobel
Trying to carefully thread the needle of not making any older-than-gen-z-ers mad at me while also not getting bullied by internet teens… is it working
And also taught me to spell a lot of things the British English way… why was I spelling “colour” with a u as an elementary schooler… why did I think that “faerie” was the correct spelling for many years