These players, the majority of whom are women, according to Neopets, got their first tastes of coding, web design and animation on the site. While pandemic returnees discovered this digital world is like a living time capsule, a steady corps of committed users have been dutifully caring for this cyber village. Neopets rivaled other digital pet fads like Tamagotchi and was cross-promoted with small pet-like toys in McDonaldвЂ™s Happy Meals, but over the years, it struggled to adapt to new technologies and attract younger generations of players, and, as a result, the website slowly stagnated. When Neopets was first introduced in 1999, it was an instant success among children browsing the internet for the first time, boasting 25 million users by its peak in the mid-2000s. For the uninitiated, Neopets is like Animal Crossing meets PokГ©mon meets early Myspace: The platform allows users to explore a charming, click-based universe and rear magical pets while building their own webpages and socializing on glittery chat boards. Many former users returned to their dormant accounts in the last year or so, driven by boredom, nostalgia or a desire for escape - the siteвЂ™s team reports a 30 to 40 percent spike in usership in the months following March 2020. Kennedy isnвЂ™t the only millennial who logged back into Neopets during the pandemic. вЂњIt felt like coming home,вЂќ Kennedy, a 29-year-old web developer from Arizona, wrote over Neomail, the websiteвЂ™s internal email system. She selected a piece of вЂњThornberry JellyвЂќ from her inventory, chose the вЂњfeedвЂќ option from a drop-down menu and clicked the giant yellow вЂњsubmitвЂќ button, repeating this process several times until a dialogue box on confirmed that her virtual pets were вЂњsatiated.вЂќ With her pets happy again, Kennedy, who goes by the username вЂњiplatypus,вЂќ realized just how comforting it was to see their smiling cartoon faces on the browser-based game sheвЂ™d been visiting since 2003.

Feeling terrible that she had neglected them, Kennedy sprung into action. Big blue tears of hunger and sadness ran down their cheeks. When Allison Kennedy visited her Neopets in May after a four-year hiatus, they were crying.

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