A History Of Neopets Controversies 

this is your reminder to go feed your Neopets it’s been ten years and they’re dying

My brother got perma-banned from neopets when he was 8 (around 2003) for asking in the forums why they didn't have any jewish holiday-themed items to go with the christian holiday-themed items. He's still (understandably) salty about that one lmao

I expected the controversies to be like “they didn’t pay this worker!” Or “this neopet is weird!” But then I saw Scientology and was just like 🤨🤨⁉️

“hopefully they’ll find a way to avoid the decades of drama that plagued the website” 5 months later: “so neopets is selling NFTs”

I guarantee Harley was being intentionally alarmist about the importance of feeding his Neopets to convince his mom to let him keep playing longer. Source: I did this.

i dont know why but "he doesn't even know what a virtual soup kitchen is!" is the funniest thing i've heard all day

Imagine going to a cassino and thinking "be cool, it's just like neopets, right?"

Imagine investing in the neostock seeing a neocrash and getting into neodebt

Did they really expect the fanbase to believe them when they basically said "We can't change a JPG"

"i remember neopets! how many controversies could they possibly have?" runtime: 47 minutes chapter 1: scientology 😱🤣🤣🤣 i am so excited

the idea of a kid having to gamble just to feed his children is so funny to me

Clicking on a neopets related video and encountering the word "Scientology" felt like a baseball bat to the throat. 10/10 Would recommend

When my older sister was like eight or nine (during the height of neopets, before kids had access to Internet easily) my dad’s april fools prank was to tell her that neopets was shut down because terrorists were using it to communicate and she told all her classmates that neopets didn’t exist anymore and kids were having full on meltdowns and crying

One of my best friends from highschool met her fiance on Neopets. He moved across the country for her and everything.

As a little kid, I never realized how scummy the immersive advertising was. I just thought it was pretty dope that, if I were to live in this cool fantasy world with my Neopets, I'd still have access to McDonald's and Disney movies and stuff.

I remember my entire elementary having those McDonald’s plushies. I had the cat with the neck floof (can’t remember the name) And we’d all role play at recess. Then one day It fell out of my pocket when I was walking home. Needless to say I was crushed. Luckily I ended up finding it on the path to school. But there was some bad news…..a dog got to it and tore its back open. Then my loving mother stitched it back together 😊bless her heart

The audio of Izzy saying "Big brain small peepee. Or none at all. Stonks" so solemnly in her accent is so fucking funny and adorable

"It's crazy how far people will go just for a pet with slightly different art" -Me, a pokemon fan, Sweating

Sanitize, normalize, and glamourize is the next gatekeep, gaslight, girlboss.

my least favorite neopets controversy was when my older cousin told me he made a neopet named geodude before pokemon red and blue came out and I totally believed him

I remember being perpetually disappointed because I wanted some of the nifty colors, but even basic paintbrushes were SO expensive that (when they were actually available for sale) it was just depressing to look at them.

i would like to thank the youtube algorithm for this GIFT

knowing this is where so many of y'all spent your formative years explains a lot about the internet today

The only "controversy" I remember is when an Avent calendar day was bugged and it keep giving points so of course I got enough to buy a lab back in the day that December

I created the original “nerd” named pet. Was astounded it was available so took that in a second. My account had well named, painted pets with neocash clothes, completed lab ray, and millions of neopoints before it was hacked and everything was gone. I’m still mad about it tbh.

I seriously don't buy the "can't convert back" thing when it's literally just a jpg you can overlay whenever/wherever you want

I love how amongst all the vulgarity there’s just “Anyone play Mario Kart 8?”

Honestly, losing badly at gambling in a video game as a kid would have taught me a lot about gambling. Mostly how it's just not worth it. I remember games with minigames that were just gambling and a way of bolstering your currency. I would avoid them because I knew I'd lose.

This gave me flashbacks of 7-8 year old me trying to understand the stock market, failing miserably and logging everyday for the free omelette so my neopets wouldn’t die of hunger, I was a very poor but loving parent

i always find it funny how the most ‘wholesome’ looking franchises manage to attract loads of drama

no matter what you think of any of this, you’ve gotta admit that the neopets fandom comes up with some truly cool names for stuff. ‘savage saturday’ and ‘the day of sin’ sound like legit historical events

The fact that people are doing deep dives into the weird shit I got into in middle school brings me a great deal of joy. It's *history* now.

My neopets account was frozen when I was 14 because I had stumbled upon some fake items in the money tree and sold them without realizing they were fake. Basically I just wasn't a super knowledgable neopets user and didnt use the forums so while I loved Neopets and used it daily, I had genuinely no idea that fake items were possible at all, I didn't even realize the items I was grabbing were rare or expensive, I just grabbed them because they looked strange. They were Thyoras Tear, which has a black background in the preview image rather than white. Apparently they're very sought after battle items (I never used the arena so I didn't know about it lmao). As of right now they're worth 33 MILLION neopoints, but back in the day I think they were actually worth a lot more than that. I grabbed at least 2 or 3, and when I saw the prices, I just figured it was the act of a very kind and generous user and I had a stroke of luck, but I was devastated when my account was frozen not long after selling. I know a part of it was my fault for being out of the loop, but it still felt so unfair. I just remember thinking about how, I was a teen, even though I had this account for a long time and would miss it dearly for the nostalgia, yeah I'd survive lol, but damn, imagine the LITTLE KIDS on the site who fell for that sort of thing getting their entire accounts frozen, and being blamed for the actions of adults using exploits that SHOULDN'T EVEN BE POSSIBLE, if the game designers just had a safer and better built website. It's just a lot of unnecessary fear and grief that should IMO have a better resolution than 'if you dont want to get in trouble for something you didnt even do, then don't get tricked in the first place kids!!' :///

the fact that this topic could warrant a 50 minute long video terrifies me beyond reason

It honestly surprises me that Sophie the swamp witch isn't a furry icon, the disrespect is too much

I used my first paycheck on a virtual pet ten years ago - I bought a UC Plushie Bori for $450 when I was 16. I went and bragged on the trading forums, and then my 5 accounts and all of my sister's accounts were deactivated. Love that for myself.

The whole gambling controversy is so funny to me because when I was little, my aunt gave me her Mario 64 game for the DS. The gambling part of the game was my favorite thing to do. And no one bat an eye when I showed them I was learning how to play blackjack from Luigi 😂

Earlier controversies: Oh no they're shoving advertisements down the kids' throats and letting them do virtual gambling Later controversies: Art changed, let's illegally get pets with the old art because it's rare

Sometimes when I watch your videos I wonder if you're either much older than me or much younger than me but we're very online when you were very young. I remember feeding my neopets and my middle school library lol. I'm 30

Paintbrushes were the virtual equivalent of gold to me as a youngster. I remember checking the "secret" shops in the fairy village but never actually having enough NeoPoints to buy anything cool... Also, there was a battle arena for NeoPets where I always got my pets asses kicked, which made me a sad child. Good times.

I'm going to age myself by saying that I remember being an early "rich" Neopets player back when it was near impossible to save 1000 neopoints and own a single golden negg. My pride and joy at the time was my store full of rare, high-priced neggs... seems sad now, lol

as someone who had never had an account on neopets, seeing "scientology" in a video about the controversies of basically the first virtual pet forum almost made me question if this was the right video

This made me remember how I scammed someone in my guild into giving me their lab ray map pieces. Also I had a neofriend who convinced me she was Emma Watson. Neopets was a lawless place.

This video helped me remember the name of Petz Dogs 2, a childhood favorite video game that I couldn't remember the name of for YEARS. THIS HAS LITERALLY BOTHERED ME FOR YEARS. (I recognized the music from the game and saw the music sited in the description)

This is my favorite izzzyzzz video yet. Top tier. RIP Tamponslut

"The Nine-Year-Old Who Ran An Organized Crime Ring On 'Neopets' Is The Internet's New Hero" and whoever it was they still are...

this is embarrassing but my fave part of neopets was when i used the boards to find groups that would roleplay as warrior cats when i was like 10...

For context, I'm 26 now. I started Neopets when I was around 6 or 7, and I remember finding/being on the message boards when I was about 11 or 12. There were likely so many predators there - I remember people forming online relationships, myself included! I also remember when you could create a new, blank page to link on your profile where you could format the page with your own pictures, text, etc. I was learning to code at 12 🤣 I miss those days.

Apparently I lost interest before they went with sponsored stuff from McDonald's and Coca-Cola in-game, because I have no memory of that whatsoever. I do remember sneaking up to take chunks out of a giant omelet randomly lying on the ground, various colored snowballs and cannons as weapons/items, and the fact that there was always a Skeith named "turdmuncher" in the pound.

Can we appreciate how pretty Izzzy looks like in all these videos? It looks like they put in a lot of work to their makeup alone in each video, nevermind all the effort in these vids

Can I just say how funny it is that “UC” is being used to refer to rare vintage neopets 😭 I go to UC Berkeley but now my brain reads it as “unconverted Berkeley”

You should 100% do a video about Habbo Hotel. I spent YEARS on that site as a tween and never knew it was such a magnet for pedo’s and other creeps.

I laughed so hard when I heard that a mother was outraged because her kid was playing virtual poker to feed their virtual pet because I never realized that that’s exactly what I was doing. Wild times. Well tbh not so much to feed them as paint them. But hey I got my Royal Shoryu eventually so

Me: Hasn't thought of Neopets in 15 years. Also Me: Time to watch a 46 minute video about Neopets controversies.

“Rest in peace, Tamponslut”…okay I nearly chocked on my drink from laughing so hard

I’m surprised the Joanna Barker situation didn’t turn into a true crime case ☠️

im realising that we’re really old to think people my age can make nostalgic videos like this now

42:40 “ITS SUMMER, I GOT MY HAT ON BACKWARDS AND ITS TIME TO FUCCKIN SIN” I’m gonna start quoting this everyday.

how could you complain about immersive advertising when you’re obviously advertising Garfield 🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄

this is insane. im so glad we all remember Neopets. i specifically remember one girl named snoopy who was like *the* best with making guild layouts and had THE COOLEST painted pets.

I'm surprised the rumor about them killing Webkinz wasn't in here, I guess that was more of a Webkinz thing though. I also have a story about that. I never played Neo Pets but I had seen them advertising on TV and my younger sister was a huge fan of Webkinz and the Beanie Babies site and I asked her if she thought Neo Pets looked fun, she just got upset and said it was violent and I just ended up really confused from that as it was a kids game. I did hear my mom reassuring her a one point that Webkinz couldn't die though. Years later I learned about that infamous rumor and put two and two together and finally found out why she hated NeoPets.

I officially left Neopets when they added a premium currency that cost real-world money. I felt lied to and betrayed because I had seen an early Q&A with TNT in which they said that Neopets would NEVER have any features that cost real-world money. I specifically remember that word “never”. I was surprised that nobody seemed to talk about that.

I've got to be honest, as someone that has a nearly 19 year old acount, I can't believe it's still going.

Me: I absolutely HATE drama!!!1! Also me: **bingewatches this entire channel cutely**

Love this video! I was CRAZY about Neopets from about 2000-2005/6. I was 10-16. Take a seat, kiddos, and hear my war stories! I was vaguely aware of the UC drama but chose to take no part in it. I was a good kid who liked following rules, being kind to younger users, and tricking dumber, cruel users into getting themselves banned. I was big on role playing (collaborating on improv-ish, fan fic stories) on the Neoboards and customizing my page or my pet’s house. I dabbled in some hardcore html coding. Manically hunted down different avatars. I had the time of my life, man… It was like a corner of the virtual Wild West for kids to tweens. One time, the Wheel of Excitement gave me a baby paintbrush. It was like I had won $10,000. Ended up using it on my aisha, after weeks of debating whether to sell it or not. I would never get another paintbrush, but I wasn’t greedy. Used my Neopets bank account to earn interest, played some games for daily/weekly income. My pet’s house had so many treasures in it. I bought the overpriced magazine and even that Darkest Faerie video game. What a time to be alive! The environment ended up becoming too toxic for me around 2006/2007. Or maybe I just grew out of it? Sure wish I could remember my username and password just to stroll down memory lane. Well, if you’ve read this far, thanks for listening to this ol’ Millenial geezer. 💜

i always say: the giant omelette is the reason we're all socialists now

between 2016-2020 i would go through phases of being super into neopets usually for a few months at a time and one of the things that I always struggled with was how often I would get in trouble for talking about being gay, like extremely clean and otherwise family friendly posts i would make mentioning my sexuality or pride in general would get deleted and in some cases get me a strike on my account because discussing "homosexuality" was against the rules. they finally removed the ban in december of 2020 and then when june rolled around they started making neopets pride merch which is so hollow to me its funny. My girlfriend also got a strike in 2020 for talking about being disabled. its so insane to me that neopets is/was a living relic of the 2000s for not just its aesthetics but its very specific brand of bigotry.

Seeing "Avril Lavigne" on the list of censored words brought back *so many memories* from the early early days...

I once had an orange cat named Garfield, I think that this was good context to say this-

My mom always thought it was great that it taught me how to gamble and about the stock market. She thought it would encourage problem solving skills.

Watching this and realizing I was an obsessive active player during the most boring time. The craziest thing that happened during my tenure at Neo was the buyout from Jumpstart and how immensely incompetent they were from the start, with horrible site performance to inflating the economy with a new daily that made junk items worth over $99k np. I think I stopped playing before the UC hacks I always did want a UC mutant hissi and gelert...

In-game advertising makes me think of Poptropica, where they literally had islands to advertise books or smth (it was still fun, because they made it a story. Or you go through the story?) And they had an advertisement on an billboard in between spots on one island. I still loved Poptropica though, it was so much fun

Oddly the history of neopets shows the progression of internet capitalism

I can’t believe that for 27 minutes I completely ignored the army of Garfields behind you I cannot go back

Note on the UC-Santa thing: It was just someone who was a little code savy. It isnt hard to make a program that could search the list of images for you and highlight the UC's. From there he could have either hoarded them all or given them away and guaranteed his fame. Obviously he did the later. As for whether the savage saturday was still him or someone else idk, never knew about it and never asked.

I remember my first experience with virtual gambling... To this day I still believe Luigi was totally cheating.

the neopocalypse has the same energy as when there's a substitute teacher & the teacher yells at everyone the next day

Neopets gambling just taught me that it was not a reliable way to make money lol

I remember being about 4 years old and running back and forth between my dad's work computer and the family personal computer to make my neopets battle........ good times lol I recently went on the site and found that most of the games are down due to the death of flash, and no alternate solution has really been put in place. It's extremely depressing,,,

Glad I found your videos! You've answered alot of questions on random topics that I just haven't had the time to look up myself. Didn't think I'd watch this many videos of yours but they are just so good!

My grandma used to play neopets daily and was one of the richest people on the site from stock trading and then someone hacked her account and stole all her neopoints :(

I agree the advertising was a lot. Even as a kid, I was like “this is ridiculous” because it got to the point that almost EVERY GAME was an ad and there were items for sale that were ads.

So much of this was after my time. I played 2001-2005 and the largest controversy was over cookiegrabbers. I was big in the stocks and shop refreshing - which was hard because of bot users - but i did well. In late 2004 malicious users figured out that they could hack players, including mods, and send their rarest items and pets to other users who would promptly get frozen for receiving stolen goods whether they wanted the stuff or not. Thats what put an end to me. Got sent a moderators rare items and was iced because of some guys in mIRC who didnt like other players.

I had a Krawk with a singular capitalised name back in the day. Got it from the pound before the pound had a trade option and back before the pound allowed you you to pick from the side columns too. Pretty sure the person who put it in mailed me and demanded I give them it back but I didn't >:) It was a blue Krawk.

Bro. Neopets literally saved my life as a child. It gave me a legit purpose and helped me kick start my writing

I’m always blown away by Izzzy’s looks in each video. They’re so creative and put in so much effort for every aspect of the video!

I love your videos so much! You’re the only RU-vidr where I just need to hear you and don’t need to see it and still understand what your talking about. Thanks for being an amazing RU-vidr, Izzzyzzz

The topics you talk about are so fun and original. Not the same drama and TLC stuff a lot of youtubers are talking about. And you do such a deep dive :)

"Players who dont win enough points through gambling to feed their pets actually have to send them to a virtual soup kitchen" HAHAHAHAHA

Of all the controversy it's important to comoare to today - when gamifying gambling in childrens games and toys is super common and happens with Real money now - microtransactions, blind boxes etc.

The late 90's early 2000's was such a great time to be a kid. I saw this thumbnail and was like holycrap I had forgotten! I never actually played neo myself but a few friends in my neighborhood played neopets every single day and I usually watched them.

As a kid I was obsessed with the neopets website but only played the games, when they came out in McDonald's it was amazing having a neopet stuffie of my own. As a dog lover I wanted to go through the drive through just to get the dog looking pets. Those were good times.

I remember being under 13 when i signed up and much of the site - including the chats - were off limits without parent permission. No lie: i had to print off a permission slip and get my mum to sign and mail it! Could you imagine????

My late wife learned HTML and coding as a kid from Neopets, as bad as it was in some regards, it was such an amazing way to help kids express their creativity. She also had a tattoo of our favorite beta Neopet, Scrunt🧡

This was such an epic nostalgic deep dive into my favorite childhood game I almost forgot about. I remember noticing changes on the site as a kid and the backstory blew my mind!!! Also your style is awesome. Thank you and much love 💖

I love how Izzy has time stamps so much

I'm not sure if Neopets saved me by letting me know at a young age that I'm easily addicted to gambling or if it created my gambling compulsion as a whole...

I stopped playing after we didn't collect enough eggs for the egg hunt and they gave us DUNG PIZZA 😭 I was so offended 😫

On the pocket games, I gambled wanting to make myself and my pet rich so much that my pet ended up running away from home because it felt neglected. The scene was a simple line drawing of a pet with its back to the screen walking into the sunset with a hobo bindle over one shoulder. To this day it still makes me laugh. But then it also made me mad I lost all our riches.

Wow just found this channel and I am loving it, been binging the videos for the last two hours.