The Neopets Iceberg Explained

like all things i am super late to the party iceberg videos as you may have seen on youtube are videos explaining these types of images photos of icebergs with text on them all focused on information relating to certain topics the stuff at the top is common knowledge for the most part but like an iceberg the information gets more obscure the farther it goes down if you have watched even one of these on youtube then you know how easy it is to fall into a whole rabbit hole of these things or i guess more accurately to find yourself in a virtual antarctica these were popular a few months ago and every video i see talking about these things talks about how it's like a long dead meme so like the millennial that i am i'm here late to beat an overused meme format to the ground to talk about this one the neopets iceberg i actually saw one on the neopets read it a bit ago but when i searched for it i found an updated version with some more cool bits of trivia and an explanation so first of all i have to thank dee cathartic for making it as well as for providing context underneath it for some of those that i had less knowledge of there was one or two that i didn't know about at all okay so this is gonna be a long one like seriously i try and provide context for everyone even those with only the barest minimum of neopets knowledge so grab a snack grab a drink load up a shop to restock or something because we're checking out the neopets iceberg [Music] jelly world is a rumor and maybe even a hoax people say it's a secret world not listed on the neopian world map it's supposedly accessible by typing in the url into your browser but obviously that's ridiculous because a world made out of jelly would be impossible just kidding jelly world aside from being a secret world that houses like a couple of games and a free food source the giant jelly is also a sort of meme or inside joke within the neopets community everyone just claims it's not real and that's the joke in 2007 neopets was shaking things up and wanted to add customization to their site allowing users to dress up their pets however there was a problem many of the painted pets had different art with poses that vary wildly between colors obviously that made clothing those pets with different poses more difficult in order to fix this neopets decided to update all of the pet art standardizing the poses this was hugely divisive as many players felt that the new art lacked the charm of the old art even as the idea of customization remained popular starting on april 27 2007 some niopians with certain pet color combinations were allowed to choose whether or not to convert their pets the unconverted pets would not be able to be customized but they had the benefit of being sort of special those that remained unconverted are some of the most sought after and desired things in the game a market has grown up just around the trading of uc pets and getting an unconverted dreamy remains the end goal for many players remember you see pets these are going to be the root of a lot of later entries i actually have a whole video about this topic if you're interested so i'm just going to be brief here neopets mobile was a service offered by t-mobile starting in 2006 and ending in 2010. players could pay a subscription for access to lutari island a mobile only land it offered extremely limited neopets gameplay such as feeding your pets quests a wheel and some mini games it is best known for being the only place to get a lutari an otter like pet that cannot be traded or put into the pound lutari island and the ability to create lutari on it disappeared in 2010 when they closed down neopets mobile so now the only way to get a lutari is by creating it on its pet day this is an acronym that stands for no thank you good luck training it's a commonly used phrase on the pound board where people trade neopets it's kind of a meme within the community where people will use it even outside of transactions to describe like not liking something for example glory steak for dinner again no thank you good luck trading the lutari paintbrush was a paintbrush awarded rarely from various activities on lutari island on neopets mobile it was presumably going to paint pets a lutari island color similar to the art design of the pets used in promotional images however no colors were ever attached to them so now they're just useless but interesting items floating around the site neopets need to be fed and if they are not they go through various stages of hunger before reaching the final stage dying though neopets cannot actually die from this they will stay at this stage for the rest of their existence or until someone feeds them this is a popular joke even outside of the active player base as many people of a certain age have pets that they haven't fed or even thought about in years it pops up all the time in memes and it was most recently used in some new officially licensed hot topic merch these were two popular games that were purged when jumpstart bought neopets and took over the servers i believe the destruction of key quest was an accident but i've never heard the same set of habitarium habitarium was basically a city building game with the main gameplay loop being to gather resources and then spend it to build better structures and upgrade your environment players had to take care of the pet pet pets who they had to feed and keep safe from bad bugs who would occasionally attack your little colony and yes pet pet pets are pets for your pet pets which are of course pets for your pets you know it makes sense key quest was an online multiplayer board game it was this really cool game that basically deserves its own video but a basic rundown was that it was kind of like mario party but with keys instead of stars players moved around a virtual board and there were these mini games and it was super fun users could collect player tokens which affected gameplay as well as their game figure many have never recovered from its removal especially as it's never been clear whether they intend to bring it back or not the key quest board remains on the neo boards to this day probably one of the more popular did you knows about neopets is that at one point a group of scientologists played a major role in investing in the site during an ama one of the site's founders donna admitted that they didn't know anything about scientology at the time and called herself an adam her co-founder totally naive the company was mainly unaffected by the scientologist's involvement donna says that the company was run like a scientology org which are known for being very structured with a strict hierarchy she says that at one point they did want to put scientology onto the site in some way but did she and adam shut that down immediately and nothing like that ever made it online [Music] this is i kid you not basically a screamer that is hosted on neopets.com located in tirania it was a page with a flash file that features a pterodactyl attacking the player suddenly jumping out from the screen like right at you [Applause] [Music] the wheel of monotony has a chance to take players there automatically startling the unprepared this refers to a couple of somewhat infamous sight malfunctions one of the most known of these was in 2015 when jumpstart's profanity filter went down along with their moderation tools the profanity filter regulated everything from the naming of neopets to the neo boards and so for one wild weekend players ran roughshod with the ability to name their neopets things like the team was unable to moderate this behavior resulting in some of the most shocking and funniest screenshots ever taken on neopets while officially this was due to a server migration issue rumors abounded the jumpstart had simply fired the remaining moderation team in order to save money this only added to the feeling of ill will toward jumpstart that existed at the time [Music] in the 2000s print media still wasn't quite dead so for nearly five years an official neopets magazine was published i remember them being kind of hard to find i know that i bought the first issue from limited 2 which sold other neopets merch but i don't know where else they were available the magazine had articles on the lore of neopets pet spotlights games and like science experiments you could do and just like a whole bunch of ads they advertised their own tie-in products as well as other advertising partners that they promoted on the site a total of 26 magazines were published and they're fairly popular with neo collectors fairies are a race of creatures that inhabit neopia and are some of the only remaining humanoid style characters on the site they play multiple important roles in sight features and some of them are deeply involved in certain event plots however they seem to be a race made up entirely of women however unknown to some there are two known instances of male fairies the first the happiness fairy is a character who seems to have been invented by dr sloth and is really just the guy himself running around and spreading weirdly cheerful joy uh this also appeared in the gallery of heroes at one point the second was an april fool's day joke that ran on facebook in 2012. users could vote for the very first male fairy out of a selection of five not surprisingly the fifth fairy won but his final version ended up looking quite a bit different from his sketch treasure keepers was a facebook game started in 2011 by meteor games a game company founded by adam and donna the original founders of neopets though it was not hosted on neopets it was an official tie-in game users played as one of two characters who run a shop for adventurers the goal of the game was to sell items to customers and buy upgrades and new decorations for your shop a type of gameplay that was popular in the early 2010s on facebook items for the shop were obtained by playing through dungeons board game style maps that required some luck to get through successfully players had stats that were weighted against the different tiles they landed on and if they failed enough times they would be kicked from the dungeon with no rewards players could also equip one of a number of pet pets that were available each raising a specific stat this game unfortunately did not appear to be very popular and because of some behind the scenes issues meteor games was forced to let 90 of their staff go due to this treasure keeper was shut down only a few months after its launch players at the time received a code that they could trade in for 10 000 neopoints and a couple of rare items for a number of years after it released the purple color was not completely purple pets painted this color also had a number of orange spots in various locations depending on the pet for a long time this was just completely unexplained and neopians were left to wonder then in 2008 the orange spots were removed there was no in-universe explanation for this but there are a few theories 2008 saw the release of the plot the return of dr sloth this was originally scheduled to be released in 2004 but due to some scheduling conflicts it was pushed back by nearly four years the plot is a popular fan favorite but there's way too much to get into here although i do plan on making a video about it sometime the main thing you need to know is that during the plot a major event is attempting to unite two warring factions of grundos these like weird little alien pet guys the purple grundos and the orange grundos an evil split grundo parlax was playing both sides of the conflict pitting them against each other in order to undermine any attempts against the villain sloth in the end after disposing of parlax the two brothers on opposing sides finally came back together and bring their groups to unity according to the ama with adam and donna in the original plot parlax or i don't know a different purple grundo had been left with an orange scar after a childhood dispute this orange scar on the purple grondo was supposed to explain why purple pets had orange spots even though this went unexplained in the released version of the plot the orange spots were still removed by its conclusion this was a page on neopets that could be found on the featured news page it displayed a quote unquote live feed of the neopets office giving players a glimpse into the day-to-day of the neopets team i say quote-unquote live feed because like in the early 2000s webcams were much more primitive than they are today and what the neocam really showed was a single image capture of the office at a particular time users could refresh the page to get a new snapshot every 15 seconds or so though sometimes the camera was turned off when that happened it simply showed the last recorded snapshot sometimes the neocam was off for long stretches of time like when the team was out of the office for the holidays in 2007 when neopets was bought by viacom the neocam stopped updating entirely it's been confirmed by a member of the neopets team that as more staff was added it became an issue of consent they just couldn't ask every person are you cool with us possibly recording you would you go about your day the page is still available for viewing on neopets though along with an archive of random photos from around the office giving a peek into the day-to-day lives of tnt during a certain window of time [Music] popular for a brief period of time browser-based chat games existed throughout the auts and early 2010s the most well-known of the genre was undoubtedly club penguin but pet pet park which followed in its footsteps has a loyal cult following even to this day pepe park was a stand-alone browser-based game with a multiplayer focus player could care for one of nine pet pets none of which was actually available on neopets proper and dressed them up feed them and play games however the main focus of the game was the multiplayer chat aspect the pet pets essentially served as avatars for the players who could visit different map screens to chat and hang out with others on the site the tie-in to the neopet's main site was pretty minimal there was a mini plot that led up to the game's release and players that participated earned a wearable and an exclusive sight theme i was too old for it at the time but i do know a lot of people had a lot of love for this game like treasure keepers and key quest pet pet park was shut down once jumpstart took control of the brand there is an attempt being made to rebuild the game just like from the ground up and i wish them luck bringing back such a fun piece to so many people's childhoods if you're interested in seeing that i'll leave a link in the description [Music] this refers to the ongoing fandom discussion about the differences between neopets that walk on all fours and those that stand on two legs anthra pets or pets that walk on two legs wield weapons or otherwise participate in other human-like activity have been around for a very very long time they tend to pop up from promotional images as shopkeepers and of course as characters and plots while some simply prefer one over the other the primary fandom debate is about why both exist and if there is some kind of actual in-universe difference between them i have seen three main theories about this one that there are two universes and that in one the pets are bipedal and the other there are pets two that we've got sort of a goofy pluto situation and that some pets are simply more human than others this of course raises a lot of questions like are we the players neopets in this scenario i don't know but the third option that neopets can just swap between quad or bipedal at will might be the most disturbing of them all because if all neopets have the ability to function as humans then keeping them as pets seems pretty weird all of a sudden world challenges was yet another way for neopians to show their prowess at the myriad flash games on the site separate from the high score trophies world challenges pitted actual players against each other head to head albeit asynchronously here's how it worked players could go to a game and click the world challenge link if one was available not every game was available every day if a game was having a world challenge that day you could choose its lobby from a list and pay to play it for a one hour block say for example 8 pm to 9 pm the lobby screen displayed a lot of information such as who had submitted any scores for the given hour their wins and losses and their high scores the world challenge was completed by playing the flash game and submitting your score after entering the world challenge your score would then be matched at random against one of the other players in the lobby that all happened behind the scenes and only after a certain number of people had joined the lobby so no players could know who they had beaten or who they'd lost to scoring was a little bit complicated but basically there were three ways to win players could also take first place in multiple categories although they only won a single prize per lobby the top 50 of players received not just neopoints but also an exclusive map piece this map piece was usually related to the game in some way for example nova defender would give out a crelador map each map had 20 pieces players could win three map pieces a day and once they had completed a map they received a rare price such as a paintbrush or a rare pet pet there is a lot more that went into this gameplay mode but i think it just goes to show the different ways that neopets used to have for players to interact with each other sadly world challenges stopped functioning properly a while ago and like most things there's just no sign of their return i'm putting these together even though they're separate on the iceberg just because it's easiest to explain them together these were the first and second of neopets attempts to get mobile games off the ground to varying degrees of success modern mobile games not like neopets mobile ghoul catchers was a match 3 game whose only real redeeming quality was the ability to hook it up with your neopets account and earn 50 000 neo points a day through playing the game sorry ghoul catchers fans it just wasn't that good it also suffered a pretty terrible bug for its entire lifespan that blocked older accounts from being linked for some reason legends and letters was a better attempt at a game at least in my opinion it was a scrabble slash battle game where your party members dealt damage based on the words you played on the board like many games of this kind it had some fun level up and gotcha mechanics and later on introduced daily rewards and challenges which could unlock prizes on neopet's site itself both of these games were officially shelved in 2020 when neopets announced their major pivot toward a mobile site the games were taken off the app stores but are still playable if you have downloaded them to a device there were a number of ads that ran for neopets in the 2000s such as the ones advertising merch or the video game but this iceberg is specifically referring to the ones that ran on nickelodeon in the mid to late odds after parent company viacom bought the site nick started showing ads promoting site events like the altador cup as well as random little animations that showed off features of the site like this animation about the lab ray nitpicky sidenote but the bloomeru turning into a kadodi is not even possible like why does this exist why does this happen anyway i digress these ads ran for a number of years from what i can tell and while there are a few on youtube they're not the best quality so i can understand why this one's so far down the phantom orange shirt guy also known as ollie is an ex-staff member of the neopets team he was a major programmer for the site primarily for flash games many of his games featured an easter egg where his avatar tposg or the phantom orange shirt guy would pop up randomly or if certain conditions were met since some of these conditions were weird or like really uncommon his appearance was sometimes a fun wink to players because of this recognizable status he gained kind of a cult following on the site becoming a beloved member of the team this references a caption contest entry that was posted to the neopian times a user asked once about how contest entries were selected and an editor posted a supposedly random selection of entries as examples one of them was this one and i'm going to try to read this as accurately as possible ah mr snucky i see you are wearing your fan's top you are wearing yours too mr coconut speaking of coconut where did you get the new flying hat of coconut what coconut oh that coconut near my head what a coconut on my head boom ah my head good night mr coconut mr coconut quickly became an inside joke among fans and has popped up on multiple places on the site [Music] in the late 2000s it was common for websites to provide toolbars for users to install to their browser these worked like extensions that gave users a number of benefits like being able to search specific sites easily or keeping track of real-time news stocks and rss feeds neopets put out their own version which was really just a rebranded yahoo search bar that had a number of features such as quick links a search bar neo-mail and most famously tireless treasures charles's treasures worked like this occasionally when browsing the web an icon on the player's toolbar would blink and if the player saw it fast enough and was able to click it they would get a rare prize prizes were typically pretty good such as things like paint brushes secret lab map pieces and doubloons just to name a few players who adopted the toolbar also gained early access to creating a bori as well as exclusive access to the icebory for many years the only way to get a nice bori was by installing the toolbar as they could not be zapped dipped or even pounded as an iceborn would become normal colored upon entrance to the pound i can't even begin to go into why some users find some antagonists relatable or sympathetic there are simply too many of them many of the plots are well written with villains with very sympathetic motivations and users find the villains compelling but x did nothing wrong is an evolution of the troll phrase hitler did nothing wrong i know i know i know this phrase is often used by people who think that ironic racism or anti-semitism is funny or whatever i don't condone it however it has since morphed into the semi-ironic phrase used by many fandoms who seem the harm in their problematic characters but like i guess enjoy standing them anyway see also homestuck berserk pokemon i don't condone the use of this phrase given its connection to 4chan anti-semitism but it's on here and that's why i mean this is just what it says on the 10. for those who don't know judora and illusion are fairies that give players quests these quests are a little unique from other fairy quests and that they can be taken at will as long as you have not taken the opposing fairies quest within the last 12 hours they allow the use of the shop wizard and they even level up allowing you to take more quests that give out better rewards however your level will be reset if you fail to return the quest item in the time limit neopets is a fandom just like any other so in the end shipping is gonna happen whether jedora and illusion are dating want to date or use to date is up for some debate but many feel the romantic tension between them is palpable because their reasons for hating each other is unclear april fool's day has been a long-standing tradition on neopets and while i'm sure many of them could and will make this iceberg i can see why nick made this list nick was a fictional human character a rarity on the site who had been brought in by tnt to spiff it up a bit unfortunately for our boy nick both times have been something of a disaster in 2003 neopets was rebranded as neopets a totally rad and hip new design on top of introducing us to nick they also announced that they would be doing away with currency entirely making everything on the site free then in 2020 nick made a reappearance updating the site once again this time he made the pages fresh and innovative by flipping them upside down reversing their text or randomizing links on the site he also supposedly was like the mascot for the neopet team's tumblr but i can't find any evidence of that but that keeps popping up when you search for him so i guess it's true every so often neopets deletes large amounts of inactive accounts in what is known as a purge this is done for a number of reasons to free up space to keep the servers running smoothly and to free up long dormant account and pet names you name it obviously losing your long beloved account and neopets can be heartbreaking but there are also those who look forward to them mostly in anticipation of freeing up some rare and valuable pet names some people even keep a list of desirable names on hand and check them for purges from time to time there have been a few large purges in the opius history as well as a few smaller ones but i don't think there have been any in a long time like the debate about neopets sentience genetics is another hot button issue how exactly do neopets make little baby neopets without a paintbrush i mean it's unclear there are a number of characters that have kids or siblings of a different species so why can neopets have babies that aren't their species an ex-member of the neopets team snarky once confirmed on her tumblr they just can she went on to say that there is a set of internal rules for the staff but she didn't elaborate on what those are perhaps that's in that neopian bible that's a little further down the iceberg this is so ingrained in my brain it's hard for me to believe that this is so far down the iceberg but then again whenever i bring it up it seems like it's a surprise to at least one person so maybe that's right in the first year of neopets before it really blew up it was basically the wild west without knowing what a huge and young audience they were about to receive adam and donna just went nuts and one way they did that was in the design of the original neopets these range from scary to the adorable to the for example the bruce was originally bruce forsyth a well-known british entertainer with a lengthy career as a host of variety and game shows and when i say the bruce was bruce i mean he was bruce the image was just a poorly photoshopped image of a young bruce forsyth over the then customary blue circle and he came in the original four colors the next one's even weirder the doe-eyed cutie the cow was originally macey gray like beloved singer-songwriter macy gray [Music] this one was at least an illustration she only came in three colors and had a ray gun the iceberg doesn't mention this one but there's also at least one other human neopet that i know of melish who eventually became minzy he was designed after one of adam's friends and frankly he's my favorite of the adoptable humans am i the only one who thinks he was cuter as a person fortunately or unfortunately depending on your perspective soon after neopets huge popularity boom they redesigned a lot of pets some just to bring the art up to standard and some to protect the site from concerns about copyright this was probably for the best although i'll always look back on the time you could adopt literal humans as pets with a deep fondness i've mentioned this a couple of times before but in case you don't know in neopets players can paint their pets different colors to change their appearance this is done through the use of consumable items called paint brushes the rarity of the brushes depends on the color for example the purple paint press talked about earlier in this video is fairly inexpensive and common however some brushes aren't being produced anymore and cannot be bought in official neopian shops these brushes are labeled as retired when they're in their inventory they can still be used though and players can still obtain them through random events and as prizes for certain things on the flip side of retired paintbrushes are retired colors different from retired brushes pets cannot be painted these colors anymore the most well known of these are glass and stone these were retired respectively with glass pets art becoming tyranian pets and a few years later stone turning into island pets the brushes however remained on the site and stayed the same in ethiopian times article the editor writes these may become collector's items due to their rarity that actually didn't happen and instead those two brushes are now just dirt cheap and totally unusable two other unusable colors are the lutari paintbrush that i talked about earlier and the unicorn brush which early on turned pets white and gave them a horn i actually love everything about the unicorn pets presumably the release of the uni pet made this brush obsolete and it was completely removed from the site i would love to see her return someday though remember unconverted pets i hope so because this isn't the last time they're going to come up uc gate refers to a bigger fluffle around those unconverted pets and the pound the pound is a place where neopians put pets they don't want anymore it's sad but true they're not deleted though other users can visit the pound and adopt those left there it's a bit clunky and weird so clunky and weird actually that it's haunted by a well-known glitch see the way the pound works is that players search the pound by clicking a button to see more however this glitch causes certain pets to get stuck their names contain strings of letters that for whatever reason cause them to not show up in the pound this means that there are hundreds of pets that cannot be found from randomly browsing although they can be adopted if you search their name manually and so that's what stuck pet hunters do they manually search the pound for pets whose names include these strings of letters in hopes of freeing them or finding rare and unusual pets without getting into the details there's a great post on r hobby drama that i'll link below if you want to read more some users found a way to search large chunks of pets at a time one of those users apparently hit the jackpot on november 22nd 2019 a user later dubbed uc santa dropped a list of 700 unconverted pets on the official forums enjoy or something idk they said i just want to see poundchat go crazy and go crazy they did 700 pets may sound like a lot but neopets players are ravenous for unconverted pets they can't get enough the pets were quickly snatched up and not all by the needy one person claimed to have adopted 12 pets filling up their main and side accounts to the max pet limits it was pandemonium like i said the full story is wild but the pound chat was reeling for weeks then unceremoniously someone claiming to be the uc santa on a different account appeared again dropping the name of a few uc pound pets to prove it this person also hinted a few times that december 28th would be a big day and the pound chat waited with baited breath then at 6 00 p.m on december 28th the unconverted santa posted this psych you bunch of beggars if you want your dream unconverted just buy it with us dollars and then posted a list of cheat sites basically revealing the whole thing to have been a huge troll the boards basically melted down at this point people were pissed they were salty they were hugely disappointed it's gone down in infamy especially among those who were there no one knows if the second poster and uc santa were the same or if they were just some troll who wanted to create more chaos but it did create an incredible story again if you want to know more i highly recommend reading i am not a windmills excellent write-up about this on hobby drama in 2006 at the website's peak variety reported that warner brothers had bought the rights and an animated film was in the works not much is actually known about it but we do have some hints from the ama donna and adam did once production began in the film the two wrote a treatment starring fiora the fairy queen apparently this was discarded and then the film seems to have gotten caught up in development hell adam and nana say that new writers kept being shuffled around until things just kind of fell apart the last official news of the film was on the flash game jelly blobs of doom which states that the movie is due out sometime in 20xx but the announcement of the neopets animated tv show last year i think it's fair to say that the movie has long since been scrapped the neo boards are one of the most common ways to chat with other neopets players users can advertise shops get help with ferry quests or just chat about site events these are easily accessible from the neo boards option under the community tab some boards are not so easy to find them boards have been added and deleted over the years and some such as the old jelly world board was completely hidden and could not be accessed without a direct link or at least it would have been if when it existed you know what i mean unfortunately jelly world's board seems to have been deleted in the recent site overhaul even though strangely some older boards seem to have stuck around in the redesign like the key quest board other hidden or deleted boards include the premium board available only for users paying for neopets premium as well as the old neo-homes board the evil things board and the old theme park board this is another one that i have to thank our slash hobby drama and the user i am not a windmill for their record keeping of this particular bit of drama is priceless jungle boo was a pet an unconverted derrick and bruce owned by a member of the neopets team a staff member who works for the site remember unconverted pets are rare and highly sought after because they are pets that could only have been created before the pet conversion in 2009. there was something odd about this bruce however users on the site eventually noticed that she wasn't nearly old enough to have been unconverted her age at 2 600 days old meant that she had to have been created in 2013 well after the pet conversion as you can imagine there was outrage the neopets team had been saying for years that creating new unconverted pets was something that could not be done and yet here was undeniable evidence to the contrary and of course people were angry at just the general unfairness of it a staff member giving themselves an extremely rare and valuable pet went against everything that was supposed to be fair and just as the namepets team always claimed that they never used their powers for their personal accounts there was apparently a minor attempt at a cover-up as jungle boo's date of birth was changed from 2600 days to 7 600 days old making her as old as the site itself then as users became even more outraged and this was called out on the boards and twitter jungle boo was just converted entirely as far as i'm aware there haven't been any official statements about it i actually remember when all of this went down and i seem to remember there being a follow-up but i can't find any evidence of that so i'd really be happy to hear from y'all if you know anything about this one it is such a crazy bit of drama and it obviously has huge overarching implications for the neopets team and favoritism and exactly how unconverted pets can be created i just find this one really interesting back in what i earlier called the wild west of neopets there was not quite the same standard applied to world building as there is now as i understand it nowadays there's an effort made to stick to a consistent world and theme back in the early aughts though it was a different story and so there were a lot of humans walking around neopia many of these were story npcs and shopkeeps characters like edna the witch and the island mystic were originally humans only changing after tnt cracked down on the idea that there were no humans in neopia the only existing possible exception to this is the tiki tactom bola man though what exactly is happening under that mask is anyone's guess neopets and pokemon evolved right around the same time pun intended so it's no surprise that early neopets threw in the jokey little reference to their rival pet collecting game on a page known as the gallery of evil a collection of evil and monstrous creatures from all around the site there was a page dedicated to the pikachu eater it was this weird froggy lizard-looking thing with the unmistakable ears and tails of the beloved pokemon pikachu poking out of its mouth i can't find any images of its gallery page from back in the day but the current site does contain a reference if you look closely at the open gallery of evil book you can see a distinct yellow creature getting chomped on earlier we talked about the return of dr sloth plot and how it had to be put on hold for a few years hannah in the ice caves was the plot that ended up replacing it in a reference to this and an alternate ending to the hana plot dr sloth apparently took this pretty hard and sent one of his minions to transfigure hannah in revenge for taking over what was supposed to be his event this joke final page was eventually replaced with the canon ending to the hannah and the ice case plot on december 23rd [Music] a long-standing infamous user best known for being a former mod with some of the strongest pets in the game the position of having the strongest pet meant that she placed highly in early battle dome-based plots for example she is the only user to have ever received the unique item darrigan's sword of death her account has been compromised at least once with the ultra-strong pet in question having been pounded although he was eventually returned to her she's a controversial figure with many believing her to have received special treatment from tnt as well as the fact that she received aforementioned strongest pet from her boyfriend when he left the site i imagine she's in this place on the iceberg because she was mostly well known over a decade ago when things like placements and battle dome plots were a much bigger deal than they are now so i remember when i said that neopets couldn't die i'll hold on to that because it remains true but this part is about to get a little spooky this refers to official art of dead neopets and i don't mean ghost pets in the early days there was something called the pet cemetery i think this was just mostly a joke as a play on the stephen king novel as it didn't really do anything as far as i'm aware pets were just never meant to die like adam and donna didn't have plans to create dead pets or anything they just put this page in as a joke despite this though there is still a bit of official art from the early days depicting dead pets floating out there in the internet ether long considered lost media the last smiley was a notoriously difficult and strange neopets game that was eventually removed from the site but not placed in the official games graveyard where players can revisit retired games a lot of games didn't end up in the game's graveyard mostly because they were timed sponsorships and keeping ads on the site without getting paid was not exactly the neopets way the last smiley was not one of these however it was a strange 3d platforming game in which you played a smiley trying to save a bunch of emojis or emoticons back in the day i guess from some sort of like forum based doom instead of flash it was one of the few to utilize shockwave in service of creating a really unique unusual game as i said before it was long thought that this game had been lost a time however some time ago some users discovered that neopets still hosted some of the files for games that were no longer listed on the clear site this included some sponsored games as well as the last smiley in 2000 neopets added the cooking pot to mystery island the cooking pot allows users to combine multiple items to create one entirely new item the recipes are a mystery however with users having to discover what items combined to make what on their own the spoppy was a pet pet that could be created out of the combination of a puppet and a spider pet pet it was a pretty unremarkable item except for one thing somehow there was a glitch in which multiple spoppies were being created with different item ids since all items of the same type are supposed to have the same item id to keep everything nice and neat in the database the neopets team named these errant news poppies spoppy2 and spoppy3 apparently solving the problem and ending what seems to have been a duplication glitch that was occurring at the same time these ended up being very rare items with only a few spoppy two and three in existence they can no longer be created in the cooking pot but pet pets can be zapped into a spot b2 with the pet pet labret scurvy island was the canonical island that played a role in the curse of maraqua plot in 2005. though originally announced as a new visitable location on the site the neopets team decided against adding it according to the times editorial and issue 180 it was going to be too similar to croc island and so they decided to devote more of their time to maraqua this is the very first neopets mobile game released even prior to lutari island and neopets mobile gameplay consisted of uh rolling a coconut and getting points based on how far it rolled users could submit high scores with a unique code given by the game and earn prizes and a very rare avatar as far as i know like almost nobody had this game so that's a fun one so one thing i haven't talked about much yet is the battle dome the battle dome was created pretty early in neopets history creating a use for all of those cool stats your pets could get and train players could play against a computer or human opponents equipping their pets with items or training them to get special abilities gifted by fairies these were given to pets mostly through the use of bottled fairies with each fairy element giving out a different set of abilities there was no limit to the number of abilities a pet could learn unlike now when each pet can only learn one ability per tier this meant that wealthy and dedicated players could eventually teach their pets every single ability provided that they could get the appropriate fairy bottle and that their pet was a high enough level the abilities included things like fly heal and thunder tail when the battle dem 2.0 came out all ability points were reset to zero and those who had dedicated their time to training all their pet's abilities were given 1 000 neopoints for each ability that they had at reset which is hugely underpaid the officially licensed neopets cereal produced in 2006 by general mills it featured an original character jake the explorer a cougar with a fondness for island berries and presumably cereal each box came with one of three official neopets trading cards there was a tie-in with the site where players tired of feeding their pets free omelets day in and day out could give their pets a free bowl of cereal instead for a limited time this was a game that existed way back in the day it was not a card based solitaire game but based instead on peg solid think that game they have on all the tables at the cracker barrel players move poogles by jumping it over another poogle and into an empty space the jumped poogle is then removed from the board the goal is to have the fewest poogles left at the end players could play the game for a small fee and once a day win neo points based on their score the most points were awarded for having only one poogle left directly in the middle players could keep playing even after receiving their once a day payout for a chance to win stat games for their neopets or more importantly to me when i was a kid a poogle plushie which had a very rare chance to be a magical poogle plushie which could turn your pet into that specific variety of poogle since pugles were a limited species this was the primary reason for playing the game these were neopets team-based quote-unquote plots they weren't really plots at all basically they were gruesome stories told over the course of a couple of weeks about the members of the neopets team getting horribly maimed and killed the first plot sacrificers was actually the first user participation event in the site's history players could vote on who would survive being eaten by cannibals yikes but other than voting and watching the flash animations there was little to it the murder mystery that came out a little bit later had a little more meat to it the goal was twofold users would vote to guess who would survive the longest while submitting questions to try and suss out the murderer players who discovered the murderer early enough and received a trophy these two events are somewhat infamous among those who participated for being pretty unflinching if cartoony depictions of the staff of their favorite website being killed as alluded to earlier a few pages of the galleries of heroes and villains have gone missing on top of pikachu eater some former injuries include daddy grubb queen spider and the aforementioned happiness fairy aka dr sloth at a fairy outfit teased as early as 2002 neo schools were a planned feature that were never released on the site it got pretty far in development and according to snarky's tumblr they were even finished behind the scenes a shop was placed in neopia central for players to buy school supplies for their pets and the new features page linked a list of all of the upcoming teachers and classes that players neopets could take according to snarky however the game while complete was just not very fun rather than release a sight feature that was boring to play they shelved it and it seems it was just never revisited i was one of the players who was really excited for it so every time i see the stationary that still exists on the site i just get a little sad [Music] now we're deep in the weeds neoquest 3d was a text based game ironically enough modeled after adventure games of the 80s and 90s like zork the name is a joke as it's even less advanced than neo quests 1 and 2 which were styled after old school sprite based rpgs it could not be found in the game room and was instead hidden in the meridel castle it was a short but fun little nod to old school dungeon crawlers unfortunately like many flesh games it is no longer on the site this refers to a set of three villains introduced and instrumental to the battle of maridel plotline the three were known individually as greed revenge and ambition although we don't know which is which and the real reason behind much of what unfolds in the plot they're kind of like the secret antagonists behind everything donna admitted in an interview when asked about the scientologist investors that the three were based on three frequent visitors connected to the scientologists adam and donna said that they just looked evil like the bad guys in superman 2. so they had the art department design the three after those three shady characters this is an extremely rare trophy given to only one user donna it was created by adam and the rest of the team at the time to make donna feel better after a particularly nasty root canal that's like literally all there was to it although it's pretty cute though [Music] two characters that were instrumental in the curse on morocco plot this was an early plot and one of the very few in the site's history with zero user participation whatsoever these two characters in particular were later retconned into totally different characters captain dredd the undead skeleton kiko was later turned into captain skarblade according to jelly neo's book of ages this is because of the difficulty they had in drawing captain dredd in the comics i mean i don't know like a skeleton kiko looked kind of easy to draw to me but i'm not sure king koi was also changed the name change could be a sort of like bowser king koopa thing i guess but he was also redesigned presumably to match the newer more shiny artwork of the later years hey remember this guy he's the cougar from the cereal box the adventures of jake was a very very short-lived comic that existed on the website it only has one chapter the mystical tiki idol it seems like he was invented to be a mascot for the serial and tnt tried to see what else they could do with him for whatever reason it seems his comic didn't really take off though jake continues to appear on the site in various ways to this day altador was a new land introduced in 2006 the first to be discovered on the other side of the planet that's right flat neopiarz neopia is a globe before its release altador was teased by a different name talador this remained its name late enough into production that some of the trading cards even have talador printed on them instead of altador in the niopian times when asked about the change the editor said that it was because lawyer bought their nickname for their lawyer uh threw a fit in the late 90s in early aughts it was fairly common for websites to have virtual greeting cards to send to friends and family's email inboxes these could be any combination of images sound and animation and they served both as a helpful site feature as well as advertisement for the website itself neopets was no exception and while most of the neo greetings are what you might expect there were a few wackier ones these range from the image of a fire fairy saying fire is a girl's best friend to an animated thank you for not eating me card but by far the darkest and most weird was the bad friend card it featured two pet pets a snorkel and a wharf spending time together the text above read friends are nice for the good times and extra special during the bad times but where were you when i really needed you toward the middle of the animation what looks like a mutant grundo hand reaches down and picks up the worf the snorkel flees leaving his friend to be devoured by the monster the aftermath of which is clearly depicted in the final shot showing an empty room with splatters of red blood low quality screenshots of the original are still floating around the web that version was eventually changed to depict green slime instead of red blood but the neo greeting itself remains on the neopets page to this day largely untouched funnily enough a screenshot from that greeting is the thumbnail for the friends section of the neo greetings page just not one of the violent parts this was a logic puzzle intended to be released during the hannah and the ice caves plot though it wasn't connected to the hana story based on the style of an earlier logic puzzle plot from 2001 the goal was to solve a number of mysteries surrounding a dangerous dinner party that involved the six most infamous criminal masterminds in neopia each dinner guest had a secret a meal that they ate a unique forum avatar and their criminal specialty clues would have been released over time and presumably those who guessed correctly would have won some sort of prize including we know for a fact the avatars that the thieves used only two clues were ever released the poison specialist ate the steak platter and the card shark was afraid of spiders it was shelved soon after that according to the official page as well as some issues of the ethiopian times the event was just started at a busy and chaotic time and they were just never able to complete it unfortunately it means that those avatars also went unused when mystery island was first released players could not just visit it whenever they wanted instead they had to ride this ferry that cost three mystery island totems items carved to look like different neopets these were only given out as random events making them difficult to come by and making mystery island that much more of a mystery in the early days these totems can still be found on the site today though they no longer serve any purpose but nostalgia and some trading card game cards were printed referencing these old totems the land totems were nixed pretty early on it seemed like it just made things pretty difficult the iceberg says land totems so it implies that there's more than just the mystery island totems i don't know of any other lands that require these types of totems editing cat here i did end up finding a couple more land totems there is the fairy totem that got you to fairyland and the ice totem that got you to happy valley i think back in the day let me know if you know of any others that i missed a rumored hacker of the early 2000s much of what is known about his hacks are based in rumor and speculation but a few things are more commonly repeated than others somehow edo came to access the database that neopets operates from and was able to change the values that correlated to things like shop size or neopet stats exactly how he did this is unknown but i think it likely that he used sql injection a not uncommon exploit that injects malicious code to websites in order to mess with their databases this is not a particularly complicated kind of hack and in the ama with donna on reddit she confirmed that the majority of neopets hackers were what are referred to by programmers as script kitties or people with very little programming knowledge who run pre-written scripts or programs to exploit known vulnerabilities i only mentioned that it's likely that he used sql injection because he's often referred to as the guy who hacked into neopets servers this rumor is repeated by people i think without a clear understanding of how these types of hacks usually work as a result of that and a policy on the neo boards that any discussion of hacking could result in a deletion of the thread or even a temporary ban people grew to believe that edo somehow wielded a massive amount of power over the site for a short period of time it's often repeated that he somehow gained a back door to neopet servers though i can find no verification of that that would indeed have been a huge deal had it happened but it simply was not necessary for the kind of damage he is alleged to have caused that rumored damage includes being the cause of a number of popular and rich user shops resetting to zero the reset of battle dome pet stats to tin an early dupe day on which days could be infinitely duplicated and even the random releases of certain limited pets i just want to repeat none of these are verified it's commonly believed that the neopets team orchestrated a cover of edo's hacks for example when some pet stats reset to tin the neopets team announced it on the news page by saying that the lab ray had misfired instead of revealing the true cause that actually did happen but a cursory glance at that page would show that they were clearly joking they sort of sarcastically mentioned it wasn't a database error at all like they weren't actually trying to convince their players that the lab ray had anything to do with it donna and adam joke in their reddit ama about edo with adam claiming to quiver in fear of his leadness and donna saying she doesn't remember half the things he's alleged to have done at this point it will not come as a shock to you that there was some mature content on neopets in its early days and that extends to items changed and removed items include bottles of beer some of which became different types of neocola and neo-wines which became sparkling juices the bottles of beer are often said to have been called neo-rona but i think this is just a rumor a pet page created soon after the changeover says that this item never existed and they were always just called bottles of beer in 2017 an item called tentacled alien wine seems to have slipped through the sensors somehow but it has since been changed to the generic and much less delicious sounding tentacled alien drink as i said before legends and letters was cancelled pretty early in its lifespan it was only active for about a year before its closure was announced so there was a lot of planned material that never got used the first bit of content that we know was lost was the next land update outdoor we know about this because it was the next on the map screen this likely would have introduced 20 new levels like in previous lands and new character cards according to the cutting room floor hidden in the game's files are 18 different unused species of leader neopets which are those created and customized by users some of these even have painted variants it's unknown if these would have been released later on as new neopets that users could create and use or if these were unused during the production of the game and there's also this picture of a factory called factory.png a long-standing mystery the edna avatar is given to the player when they complete a quest for the witch to help her make a spell unlike most avatars the exact requirements are unknown guesses include the spell must have the word rainbow in it needing items a specific rarity or items in a certain price bracket the most commonly accepted guess is that you must complete a quest that requires three items a theory that was bolstered by the niopian times editorial that said if you're trying to be thrifty about it we suggest not bothering to fulfill her requests unless she asks you for a few items it remains hard to check if this is true or not given that most people attempting to get the avatar are using this advice so they're only turning in quests with three items it's hard to say that if they got it because they turned in three items or it was just random this refers to a number of both named and unnamed neopets npcs that no longer exist on the site like i said most of these were neopets though some of these were just non-human such as in the case of the garden center shopkeeper who was just a giant ladybug a number of old battle dome challengers and neo deck cards have also been lost to time there was also a removed character from neopets the darkest fairy who i'll be talking about a little bit later on this list according to the neopets wiki neovision was a neopets themed video sharing service that allowed users to upload videos about neopia and its inhabitants this was in the early days of video streaming when youtube and other services like blip.tv were gaining success users would submit videos of neopets related things most of these were comedic in nature a lot of them were animated or stop motion featuring real-life neopets merchandise like the niopian times users whose submissions were accepted received a trophy the holiday trophies were advertised as a special trophy for winners who submitted during a special holiday spotlight presumably with a holiday theme such as christmas and halloween the trophy was uploaded to the neopets servers but it went unused however and the winners of those spotlights simply received the standard trophy for their winning submissions the altador cup is a yearly sports tournament in which different lands all around neopia compete in a sport not unlike football soccer called uball users play a number of flash games and earn points for their team winning prizes along the way jelly world doesn't have a team that competes in the cup that would be silly because it doesn't exist but they do have a practice team that players can use to learn the ropes of your ball in a stress-free environment nowadays it's made up entirely of 5 bright yellow jelly chias but older players remember the old lineup which is made of different jelly painted neopets they were ablomaru and usol a kugra a cow and a techo i can't find any reasons for the change so if you have any ideas for why that happened please let me know the shop wizard is like the google of neopets but for shops when players are making a shop on neopets they might notice a world option allowing them to choose where their shop is located at the moment there are only three options neopia central maraqua and the haunted woods at one point mystery island and virtue pet space station were also an option this might seem weird now since all the shops are essentially connected but back in the early days of neopets shops were all placed in different marketplaces though this isn't common today users could and still can browse the different marketplaces by going to the explore page in hopes of finding a bargain your marketplace also changed which shop wizard your store could be found in for a while there was a different shop wizard for each marketplace and you had to search each one individually to try and find the best deal however only the neopia central shop wizard was easily accessible with a link from the main menu the way he is now this made it quite a pain to check all the different shop wizards and many people didn't even bother and some didn't even know this was an option because of this entrepreneurial players would put their shops in neobia central there was more competition so the prices tended to be lower but also a much higher chance of your item being found by someone who wanted to buy it i don't exactly remember when it changed but i do remember that the variants stuck around a little bit after the upgraded the shop wizard to just search all the marketplaces even now you can see a remnant of this on the marketplaces though when you click the link it just takes you to a regular shop wizard another one that frankly deserves its own video so let me know if that's something you'd be interested in former staff member snarky bless her has given us quite some insight into this project designed to be a companion app for neopets and not a total replacement neopets on the go was a kind of neopets mobile 2.0 the team worked with focus groups of veteran players to find out what users would want from it and eventually landed on features that ranged from basic like checking your notifications and neo mails to more hands-on like playing games and doing dailies it also featured a new npc called blip the brilliant logistical interaction program according to snarky the app was about 97 finished when the team announced it to the site they even posted a poll about naming it however neopets was sold to jumpstart and as you've seen a lot of things just kind of died during that changeover the neopets team was never officially given a reason for the cancellation if you could even call it that the app was just never submitted to any app stores with jumpstart instead choosing to focus on the creation of ghoul catchers this refers to only one glitch of many that have haunted the grundos for quite some time a bunch of grundos were created with some sort of error that caused them to display unknown as their color instead of the color itself apparently this was fairly desirable with some people as evidenced in a neopian times editorial question which says that these glitched pets are being traded for very high value pets on the pound board the neopets team confirmed that this was unintentional and that they would be changing and fixing this glitch although it took them a while to do so grundos seem to be at the center of a number of glitches for whatever reason some grundos have been created with spaces or characters in their names which should have been prohibited as well as a number of other funny or interesting glitches this refers to an infamous glitch that allowed rare neopets to be created at the creative pet drakes were released in 2002 and they are part of the very exclusive group of pets that cannot be created through create a ped even on their pet day they are intended to be created through the hatching of a rare item called a drake egg there have been two exceptions to this however the first was on their release when an error allowed users to create drakes for a very short period of time and the second was the infamous 999 day as you may have guessed this took place on september 9th 2009 which also happened to be the drake's pet day and on this day a glitch allowed users to make a drake on the create a pet page according to jelly neo it is estimated that a few hundred drinks were created in this way before neopets caught the glitch and turned off creation however the damage was done and instead of taking those pets away from people who got in on it while the getting was good neopets allowed them to keep their new drakes 999 drakes hold a special place in some people's hearts and for some it might add value to the tradability of the drake in question [Music] most neopets players know about the colton shrine daily but much less common knowledge is who colton was how he died and who killed him colton iii was the leader of the lost desert he was known as a wise king beloved by his subjects but one night he invited his advisors to dinner and was poisoned earlier i mentioned the guild masters plot that was abandoned that was heavily based on this which was known as the usurper plot which like the guild master plot was essentially a logic puzzle players had to discover what meals guests ate at a dinner party how many courses of the meal they ate what their particular bad habit was and of course if they had killed king colson clues were released every day in the form of hints like advisor wessel had exactly one less course than the guests that ate the cheops the first in players to guess all four answers correctly received two million neopoints and they plus the next 90 got magical items at the end of the plot it was revealed that the princess sankara was the murderer she was a refugee from another country who wanted to retake her homeland and though we don't know the motive for the murder it's widely accepted that colton refused her request for an army to do just that kayla from the champions of maridell's plot used to be called kailyn her name is changed for unknown reasons i really don't have much more info than this mirrorball is a flash game that resembled squash or racquetball players controlled in aisha and tried to hit a ball back against their computer opponent there are various power-ups and obstacles to avoid a couple of years after the game's release it was removed from the site unceremoniously unlike many previously removed games it didn't make it into the game's graveyard in an editorial in the neopean times the neopets team hinted that the game had broken in some way that might allow it to be open to exploitation saying games that are still functional but have been removed from the site for reasons such as being outdated or replaced generally go into the game's graveyard but games that break are removed from the site indefinitely to avoid abuse it is not known in which way meribal may have broken [Music] this refers to an nsfw calendar made from the neopets team and sent to them by snail mail tnt addressed this in an editorial ones answering the question what is the strangest submission you've ever been sent in the mail quote that would be the niopian hero pin-up calendar someone drew and sent us around the time of the hannah and the ice caves plot we're not even sure we could describe any of the pictures burned into our poor minds without towing the line of indecency this calendar was a collaboration effort and though obviously most of it has been lost to time at least one photo attributed to the calendar does exist on tumblr notch avert your eyes if that's something you don't want to see okay we good okay let's move on this was the second ever plot neopets ever held i actually have half a script written for this one but it was so long ago and all the pages from the plot have been removed from neopets there was also no user involvement making the video more of a straight recap so i just dropped writing it it was however the plot that revealed the battle dome and morocco to players as well as a few classic characters in brief three neopets discover a flyer for something called the battle dome in searching for it they are attacked by a monster named chiazilla almost drowned and find the hidden city of morocco where they discover the leading battle dome researcher professor chester pott has been kidnapped by dr sloth it seems to be very powerful so sloth wants to claim the battle dump for himself and sends his own creation mecca chiazella to attack maraqua the real chiazella shows up and in an epic kaiju showdown saves the day in the end in order to prevent dr sloth from remember getting his hands on the battle dome the professor reveals its existence to all of niopia this plot features a number of older things that have been changed or removed entirely like the old battle domes old maraqua and the original king koi an april fool's day prank this time from 2010. it was announced as state-of-the-art combat it's time to take pain to a whole new dimension which is kind of dark thinking about it this was accompanied with a couple of videos that look i'm just going to show you i'm not 100 sure that there was anyone that truly fell for this if they watched the videos but there you have it an archive of these videos still exists on the neopets facebook page if you want to watch them another april fool's day prank in 2004 this one serving as the introduction of the qui-gookies kwiguki's are quiggle versions of usuki dolls collectible dolls much in the vein of barbies the announced kaguki armageddon trading card set promised to introduce the qigiki world of the kwagooki world of kuigara the neopets team flooded the site with kaguki content like buddy icons a how to draw page and an official neopedia entry since this was all a prank however all of it was removed on april 2nd as the kuguki's weren't actually meant to be popular at all they were supposed to be funny you know because they're like ugly or whatever however they did find their way into the hearts of some neopians including mine and over time the neopets team has reintroduced kuguki's back into our ecosystem including the quiggle exclusive kwiguki color from about 2008 to 2010 viacom was working on a neopets mmo known as tales of neopia information about this is pretty thin on the ground but there have been a few concept art discoveries that have given us some info it looks fairly typical for a medieval fantasy style mmo some concept art seems to indicate maybe an isometric map style there is npc art of shopkeepers and the resume of one of the developers seems to indicate that there was one single combat zone unfortunately this has long since been scrapped some of the leftover concept art and posters were reused as key art for the mobile app legends and letters jiren was a major character during the meridel plots he was part of the discovery of meridel and fought against the dare against citadel proving to be a crucial player later he led another attack on the citadel this time from the air while saving one of his sister's friends lord cass threw him from the citadel leading to what was known as the fall of jaren for a time he was presumed dead though it was eventually revealed that he had been saved by the air fairy this entry specifically refers to an unused piece of art known as the fall of darren card in the eventually published card jaron is holding onto a ledge close to falling as cass stands ominously in the foreground however the unused piece of art shows jaron gravely wounded on his knees having been stabbed during battle this piece of art can still be found on the artist's deviantart with the description i never knew that the fall of jiren was literal so yeah he was supposed to die by stab originally but things changed i swear this leaves it kind of ambiguous to me whether this actually was the original plan for jiren or not or if this person is just joking but either way seeing unused art like this is pretty interesting [Music] the return of dr sloth was a long-awaited plot that premiered in 2008 however as i've mentioned before it had been planned as far back as 2004 and for various reasons had to be replaced with the hannah and the ice caves plot due to this the plot that ended up on the site was different in a number of ways from the original which we know thanks to donna releasing some of her notes during the reddit ama for example in the original story the space fairy was enslaved to dr sloth where in the released version she was simply in another galaxy as mentioned before the split grundo storyline was also scrapped though the purple fainted neopets were still changed at the conclusion of the plot another interesting note is that while the plot was not published in 2004 some of the work they had done beforehand was released that year like gallery of heroes entries for the characters and some tie-in flash games briefly mentioned before the derrick and sword of death or dsod was a priceless neopian battle dome item a reward for completing the champions of marital plot only one ever existed it is believed to have been given to feather alley and she was the only known holder for many years during this time niopians speculated wildly about the amount of damage it dealt there were some educated guesses made on battle pedias and forums but as the sword was locked up in one person's inventory the true number was unknown at one point the sword was rumored to have been duplicated through some unknown means by someone who had never owned the sword it is also widely repeated that feather alley sold the sword to the user petrowan or their darrigan gallery and they claimed that it did for earth damage when i went to check their gallery for this video though i couldn't find the sword in there so i don't even know so much of this is just rumor and conjecture but for me it's just gonna remain a mystery the video store was a shop like any other located in the ops central it has been reported as a video rental store but that's just not correct the videos were for purchase like any other shop there were no actual videos attached either though there have been rumors about being able to watch flash cartoons connected to these videos for years the store only lasted for a very brief window maybe from late 1999 to mid 2000 or so it was probably changed for the same reason as neo and nnn's copyright many of the videos were plays on popular films like indiana jones my little pony and the matrix when the store was erased the videos were all changed into books the darkest vary was an rpg released for the playstation 2 in 2005. there's a lot of cut content and cool beta stuff out there as the game was originally announced for the playstation 1. the screenshots released to us then were blocky polygonal and truly horrible if i'm being honest no official reason was ever given for the jump from ps1 to ps2 though a quick look at the graphics might give a clue the promised features for the ps1 version seemed to indicate an ambitious team with plans for mini games pet pets and of the eventually implemented two playable characters although as i mentioned before one was changed entirely the red sally the aisha seems to have been changed for some unknown reason to roberta the acara it seems likely to me that given this ambition the playstation 2 would just be able to better handle the game that they intended to make though having to scrap the early development might account for some of the features being left behind like the pet pet feeding this is why you're here right this is why people sign up for these icebergs is to hear about stuff like this so one feature of neopets is the beauty contest where users can submit fan art of their neopets this fan art is then voted on by players and three are selected as winners weekly as with all user-submitted content there is something of a danger here and that danger was realized when a user submitted what this entry calls an nsfw anatomically correct usual this appears to mean that it had the number of uh teats that you might expect for an animal based on like what what's a noose hole supposed to be like a squirrel anyway while this piece of art actually did make it up for voting the neopets team deleted it pretty quickly so few people got a look at it before it vanished forever thankfully i'd imagine when this iceberg was originally written there were still a few unknown cooking pot recipes as i said before recipes are added to the cooking pot at random and no one knows what they are until they are discovered through trial and error some of the recently discovered items include the bunwich and solid toast the latter of which has been an unknown recipe since its release in 2000 although this is possibly due to a glitch these discoveries were thanks to the hard work of those on the cooking pot subreddit and the neopets discord server i believe as of right now that all cooking pot recipes have been discovered but as they get added randomly that could change at any time [Music] this is a popular fan theory that seeks to explain just what exactly dr sloth is this theory posits that he is a literal sloth perhaps maybe a mutant one from our world it's known that dr sloth is not a neoped but what exactly he is is unconfirmed he's probably not a fairy because as i mentioned there are no male fairies so the sloth thing just seeks to explain this support for this theory includes his feed which looked kind of like sloth talons his neopedia article claiming that he existed long before neopets did and the fact that like i guess sloths can grow algae probably because they move so slow turning them like a funky shade of green this is just a fun fan theory but to be honest i'm here for it sloth is a sloth let's go on the reddit this entry refers explicitly to the fake rod of dark nova the only info i can find about this is the jelly neo entry which claims that only one person has ever owned this now extinct rod i can't find any more info about it such as where it came from who owned it or if there were even any other rods of this type if you have any more concrete info on this i would love to know the fairies ruined was a pretty cool and popular little plot from 2010 which featured a number of characters both old and new from around neopets two of these xander and brynn were originally one character jokingly called branandra by snarky on her blog however due to the neopets team aforementioned desire to give the antagonists strong motivations they split the two characters in two this way users could follow one character who sort of did the right thing and one character who was motivated to do the right thing but maybe in the wrong sort of way i brought this up earlier in the iceberg and snarky has mentioned the neopets bible before there are actually known to be two of them at neopets hq a lore bible also called a show bible is a collection of history characters and plot continuity typically maintained throughout the run of a media property anything ever established in canon is put into a bible and can be referenced later media such as games and animation often have visual rules laid out in their bible as well for example shoiru will never walk on all fours they always use two feet that's just an example i don't know this for sure this kind of thing keeps the art and lore consistent over time according to snarky there were two neopets bibles one for lore and one for the site those two had different canons as the lore of neopets states there are no humans in neopia but obviously on the site you and i exist we take care of our pets this goes back to the quad versus anthro debate that i mentioned earlier the neopets team seems to reconcile this by having one cannon for the plots and events and one cannon for the site snarky provided some samples from the bible which sometimes she had to condense for potential sight buyers these included tidbits like when to capitalize nouns like neg pet species and paint colors presumably these bibles still exist as jumpstart purchased them and the servers they were housed on this refers to a list that donna left for the owners of neopets when she left this had a number of requests and a general idea about the direction of the site we've never seen the list in full but in the ama she mentions that it included things like finishing neo schools updating the pound and a battle dome revamp donna also said that she doesn't even know if anyone ever read the list all news on the new feature page prior to the year 2000 were not archived and so have mostly been lost a time because this was so early in neopet's history it only encompasses a couple of months very little contemporaneous information exists of the changes to the site at this time [Music] mary acre farms was a part of neopets that featured for lack of a better word boring html games like counting the number of potatoes on a page tower of turnips was one of these users would um stack turnips trying to make the tallest tower possible players selected their row and placed a turnip on it then if it did not fall over they repeated the process less than a year after its appearance the game was removed quote there was a big exploit with a tower of turnips earlier today that meant that people could get pretty much infinite neopoints dope we've removed the game from the site as it was flawed and the people who exploited the bug have been frozen as you shouldn't exploit bugs it's rude what exactly the x-play was is unclear but it seems like it was a way to play the game very quickly mitigating the boring factor and allowing people to farm neopoints fast the game was removed after only 276 days on the site and never returned this refers to an unofficial cards against humanity deck made by some former staff members of the neopets team black cards includes cards like the neopets team raised eyebrows with the new blank wearable and i just got the blank avatar from blank the white cards were a lot more risque with cards like ogre porn a fairy garls dick and my neopets and financial i'm gonna get demonetized on a neopets video this deck is actually still playable and i'll leave a link in the description for those of you weirdos who want to see more a long desired sequel to the popular rpg games neoquests one and two in 2006 an editorial in the niopian times said that it might be the next project after a tiranian land war which was never released whether or not this is a joke i can't tell it was also referenced in the darkest fairy trading card game expansion set on the ixy plushie trading guard which said neoquest 3 featured the most unusual monsters its desirability as well as its status as something of vaporware has made it a neopets meme akin to something like half-life 3 and it does seem that the neopets team likes joking about it for example in issue 538 of the neopian times the 2012 april fools issue a number of joke articles were published for example an article was published that detailed strategies for using the new neoquest iii charms which were pay to win style neocash charms which is kind of an incredible idea for a spoofy article there was also a skills and character guide and a guide to the boss battles of neoquest 3. it seems unlikely that we'll ever see this game i don't know if it was ever more than a joke or a hope in the hearts of neopets players still never say never i guess [Music] neopets wasn't originally going to be a website originally neopes was conceived as a java game some sources claimed it was supposed to be 3d where you played as the neopet and walked around and explored a virtual game world donna and adam hired someone to work on prototypes and kind of get it running this ended up taking longer than expected so they began to work on a tie-in website after a little while with still very little progress made on the java version they scrapped it entirely and focused on the website their work and concepts for the game got turned into the lure for neopets according to donna on the ama this is the reason for the messy confusion about neopets having owners and being pets quote to be honest the whole are you the neopet or are you the owner thing was always a bit awkward we just didn't really think about it until the site was too big to really change it i think we were too focused on adding new stuff to stop and think big picture about whether it was a fantasy world or a virtual pet site it ended up being a weird cross between the two so there you go the non-canon reason for pets being like that is they just didn't plan it out very well and that's it this took me um a long time to research and write because i wanted to make sure that i had all of the best most accurate information for all of you but even then i had to skim the surface as you can see this video is so so long i actually originally went into a lot more detail on some of these entries but it just dragged the video out longer so if there are any of these that you'd like for me to turn into a full-length video please let me know in the comments i really hope that this ended up being worth the wait and there were a couple of things on here that you didn't know about let me know if there are anything on the iceberg that you think should have been on there or if there was stuff that surprised you and yeah until next time i hope you have a great day

Channel: Kat

Views: 68,863

Rating: 4.9225636 out of 5

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Id: jBowYhSIDaE

Length: 77min 49sec (4669 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 24 2021