Back in the early aughts, millennial kids spent a lot of their computer time on Neopets, caring for and customizing virtual pets and exploring the online world of Neopia. As new games and social networks came onto the scene, Neopets experienced a decline, but it never went away. And 27 years since its launch, Neopets is making a comeback and revitalizing its community with IRL events.
The brand hosted its first pop-up experience in New York City at Shopify NY, Aug. 21-23. Steeped in nostalgia, “Neopets in Neo York” invited fans and newcomers of all ages to strike deals at The Trading Post, win plushies at claw machines, engage with a photo booth, get a tarot reading, meet Neopets artist FerWanwan, watch demos of the Neopets trading card game, shop limited-edition merch and show off their cosplays.
Attendees gravitated toward the Crayola x Neopets Mural Wall, where they picked out pet illustrations from the Adoption Center and colored them in using Crayola’s new All Grown Up markers. The designs were added to an oversized re-creation of the Neopets browser interface. For returning users who hadn’t logged into the site in years, staff members at the Neopian Lost & Found help desk checked whether old accounts survived and opened recovery cases.
“We want to encourage people to come back and say ‘hi’ to their childhood or feed their longtime pets,” says Dominic Law, ceo of Neopets. “They are starving, and they are waiting for players to come back.”
Here, Law takes us inside the brand’s first big move into experiential and how it played out as a way to reinvigorate its fanbase to return, as well as gather new interest.
Event Marketer: What has the journey to revive Neopets been like for you and the team?
Dominic Law: It’s been a very fun journey. The team is super passionate. A lot of us are Neopets players, and then some of them are like me; we played when we were a kid, and then we dropped off. So, it definitely reflects the actual user base of Neopets, where certain community members have never let go, but there’s also a much larger lapsed user base that has forgotten about Neopets. During this revival, the most interesting part has been seeing the amount of passion and love from the community.
We’ve been trying to be a lot more transparent and give the community the updates they need, but also listening to what they want, answering to a community that’s been underserved for many years. It comes with its responsibility and historical baggage, but it’s such an exciting opportunity to be able to work on this, not just preserving early gaming, early internet culture, but also being able to revive a beloved childhood brand.
EM: Why did an experiential strategy make sense for reuniting the community?
DL: We know the community has been waiting for it because in the past, we have created smaller experiences, like a booth at San Diego Comic-Con or at different types of trade shows, but the feedback we’ve always received is that for SDCC, specifically, it’s hard to get a ticket, it’s expensive, and it’s location-locked.
Overall, we have limited team resources—doing retail and pop-ups are not our forte. But with this experience, we wanted to make sure we could bring in as many resonant elements as possible from our lore and in-game elements, like the checkout area was the National Neopian Bank, and we called the fulfillment area Grundo Warehouse, an in-game location our users are very familiar with.
People were also trading with each other in real life. They brought swag to exchange and to gift to each other… The amount of artistic expression that I personally witnessed of people drawing really awesome Neopets pets was just beyond my imagination. That’s something that translated very well from the online world.
EM: What was the fan response to the event? Any early results?
DL: Overall, the user feedback was overwhelmingly positive. We know what some of the top Neopets are and created event-exclusive merch, but predicting demand is hard. Some of our items were sold out on day one, and then some of the items were not moving as fast.
The main pain point was the long line to get in, but we tried to make it as bearable as possible. We handed out a version of The Neopian Times, part catalog, part behind-the-scenes stories and easter eggs that people could read. We handed out bottled water, branded from the Healing Springs. Every small touchpoint helps bring our players into this immersive world that we’re trying to build out in real life.
We were told that we broke Shopify’s weekend pop-up attendance record, and we’d love to explore this more… Seeing the joy that we can bring to a community in real life has been very inspiring, and it is probably the biggest motivation for myself and for the team to continue to work to revive Neopets and really bring it to the next level.
