The Rise and Fall of the Virtual Pet
Samantha Trzinski, Contributing Editor
Growing up in the 2000s, I was no stranger to the world of virtual pet websites and video games. Like other children at my elementary school, I collected Webkinz plushies and scoured stores for the rarest pets to add to my virtual account. I spent hours combing through stores in Neopets to find rare paintbrushes to customize my pets and for unique and elusive PetPets to give to my Neopet. I adopted cute, furry Puffles in Club Penguin to follow my avatar – though I was limited to the “boring” Puffles that were a solid color since I could not convince my parents to pay for a premium account. Websites like Webkinz, Neopets, and Club Penguin allowed me to adopt as many pets as I would like, and I spent hours decorating their virtual houses, picking out their outfits, feeding them their favorite meals, and playing a wide variety of games to earn the coveted coins or cash to afford their lavish lifestyle.
When I could not play with my virtual pets on the computer, I turned to handheld video games instead. I had nearly every installment of the Petz franchise for the Nintendo DS as well as multiple Nintendogs games. Between these games, I could adopt cats, dogs, bunnies, hamsters, and horses, all of which I treated with love and care. However, at some point I said goodbye to these virtual pets and turned off the game, never to return. Sometimes I think about how these virtual pets are trapped forever in the memory card of a game or on an internet server. Occasionally, I log on to Neopets or Webkinz, thinking that I want to revisit the game and experience nostalgia for my now-gone childhood. When I log on to these games and see my virtual pets starving from years of abandonment, though, I feel guilty and close my internet browser. Webkinz is a bit more forgiving to its players who have been gone for a long time, but Neopets presents the player with their pet in tears from their starvation and loneliness. Though I know that these pets are virtual and therefore cannot be sad or hungry, the connection that I forged with them in my childhood makes me feel horrible for abandoning them. Perhaps that is why I struggle to return to these games. The nostalgia that I have for these games make me have this emotional response to the virtual pets that I left behind.
Players revisit these games for their nostalgic reminders of a forgotten childhood, but few recent games fit within this genre which was once so prevalent. Popular games for children in the 2020s include Fortnite, Minecraft, and Roblox. While these games offer many similar features to the virtual pet games of the early 2000s, they are missing the genre’s essential feature: pets. Games like Fortnite, Minecraft, and Roblox allow players to interact with each other in a social space and play games together, but there is no longer a centrality of virtual pets like we saw in the early 2000s. What was unique about virtual pet games like Neopets and Webkinz and the time in which they were launched? What has accounted for the decline in this genre in the current day? This virtual pet genre rose in popularity throughout the late 1990s and into the early 2000s, only to fall and be overshadowed by new gaming genres in the 2010s and into the current day.
The popularity of virtual pet websites and ePet video games seems to have been the result of rapid changes in technology that encouraged immersion and socialization in gaming and allowed for the creation of artificial pets. Appearing concurrently on the market with these virtual pet websites and ePet games were robotic pets, including Furby (1998), FurReal Friends (2002), and the iDog and the other iPets (2005). Certainly, these artificial pets still exist – websites like Neopets and Webkinz are still accessible, people still play the Nintendogs and Petz series (and yearn for a remake of the former for the Switch), and FurReal Friends still release new robotic pets. These artificial pets have not reached the same level of popularity that they once had, though. It seems that the current technological world does not have the same need for simulated pets that it once had, treating them more like accessories rather than as the driving force for games.
Virtual Pets and the Early Internet Era
Virtual pet websites like Neopets and Webkinz naturally grew out of the transition from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 in the early 2000s. For reference, Web 2.0 is the term used to describe the current state of the internet, although there are some proponents of the term “Web3.” Web 2.0 was coined by Darcy DiNucci, an information architecture consultant, in her article “Fragmented Future” (1999). Websites that are a part of Web 2.0 are driven by user participation and emphasize user-generated content and ease of use. They stand in contrast to the websites of Web 1.0, a term created in retrospect to describe the early phase of internet culture. This earlier phase featured many personal websites and static pages that were not conducive to socialization and participation.
When we look at virtual pet websites, we can see a clear transition from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0. Neopets, for instance, functions as a transitional site between these two eras. In its original form, it was comprised of static pages and personal pages. To travel to different areas on the Neopia map, the player would click on a location, which would load a new URL with a new area of the map. The player could also develop personal pages with their storefronts, which functioned similarly to blogs of the early 2000s, such as MySpace. Neopets also featured some games, like Plushie Tycoon, that used static pages. However, Neopets also relied on socialization and featured interactive games that made the site fit within the parameters of Web 2.0.
Free wallpaper provided on the Neopets website.
Although Neopets adapted throughout the 2000s to serve its players and their interests, it was limited by its original design as a creation of Web 1.0. Its decline was exacerbated by the discontinuation of Adobe Flash, a platform on which many of its games ran, and, by the 2020s, the game was largely abandoned or forgotten. In 2023, though, Neopets was purchased through a management buyout led by Neopets Chief Metaverse Officer Dominic Law, who is trying to revitalize the website and make it be of interest again in the current day. Recently, GameRant has interviewed Law about the direction in which he hopes to take Neopets, and the number of users has increased in the past year following the buyout.
Neopets is not the first virtual pet website to try to reestablish itself in the 2020s. Following the discontinuation of Adobe Flash in 2018, Webkinz also tried to reach its players in a new fashion, transitioning from a website to a downloadable application. This virtual pet website originally launched in 2005, and players could interact with virtual versions of plushies that they bought. Each Webkinz plushie came with a unique code that could be registered on the Webkinz website. This multimodal approach to the virtual pet genre allowed the company to flourish, with stores across America and Canada frequently selling out of the plushies. The virtual game itself did not differ much from Neopets. Webkinz players could play games with their pets, decorate their homes, buy them outfits, and cook them recipes. They also could travel around Kinzville and visit the doctor, participate in a gameshow, mine for gemstones, or find a part-time job. While Neopets seems to have successfully revitalized itself with its new direction, Webkinz has been less successful. The shift to a downloadable application rather than a website and their no longer requiring players to buy the corresponding plushie for their virtual pet seems to have made the website lose its unique appeal.
Although Webkinz has dwindled in popularity, it was once a major virtual pet website. In 2006, it reached 1 million concurrent players and was estimated to have brought in over $100 million in revenue in the same year, according to a 2007 article from Wired. While it shared similarities with its precursor and contemporary website Neopets, Webkinz differed in terms of how users interacted with the website. Rather than being comprised of static webpages, Webkinz was a fully interactive and animated space. It was a prime example of an early Web 2.0 website with its emphasis on interactivity, participation, and socialization. The virtual pets moved and responded to the player’s actions, and every aspect of the website involved animation and sound. Players could also interact with each other in real time and visit their friends’ virtual houses, making the game more immersive than previous iterations of the virtual pet genre.
Technological Changes and ePets
Rapid technological changes and developments in the internet allowed for the rise and eventual fall of the virtual pet website genre. At the same time that websites like Neopets, Webkinz, and Club Penguin gained a large user base, so, too, did predominantly handheld video game series like the Petz and Nintendogs boom in popularity.
The Petz series first began as 1990s computer games in which the player could adopt, raise, and breed either dogs or cats. The original games, Dogz: Your Computer Pet and Catz: Your Computer Pet, were released in 1995 and 1996, respectively. The series expanded throughout the early 2000s and into the 2010s after being acquired by Ubisoft, with games centered around not just dogs, cats, but also, hamsters, horses, bunnies, and more. Petz games were also released for consoles including the Nintendo GameBoy Advance, DS and 3DS, and Wii.
The Nintendogs series, originally released in 2005, follows a similar model as it allows the player to adopt a virtual dog which they raise and care for. While the Petz series expanded to incorporate a wide variety of animals, both domesticated and wild, Nintendogs maintained a focus on dogs, allowing the player to adopt different breeds of dogs and care for them in a virtual home. The player can also enter the dogs in contests, take them for walks, and teach them tricks. A sequel titled Nintendogs + Cats was released on the Nintendo 3DS in 2011.
Image from the Nintendogs wiki, uploaded by user Chikkane.
These games appeared concurrently with virtual pet websites, yet they reached huge levels of popularity for different reasons. Nintendogs became the second best-selling game on the DS, selling close to 24 million copies. These single-player games function as simulations of caring for pets, with the player able to interact with them in a more immersive experience. They did offer multiplayer potential with Bark Mode, where players could have their dogs visit each other. However, the games could be played fully independently if the player wanted.
While Neopets and Webkinz are aware of their fictionality and present the pets in a fantasy world that is not defined by the rules of reality, Petz and Nintendogs in contrast are surprisingly realistic. The player has to make sure to feed and water them and must give them a bath when they get dirty. In Nintendogs, the player can take their dog for a walk – but they need to pick up after their dog. Their dog will also be tired after their walk and will not want to go out again until they rest. This realism is achieved through technological specifications of Nintendo DS, and the release of the console is what allowed these games to flourish. The console’s touchscreen allowed the player to simulate petting and caring for their pets. Also, the DS’s built in microphone allowed the player to speak to their pet and teach them tricks and commands.
The technology that allowed for these games to flourish still exists in handheld consoles, like the Nintendo Switch. However, few games still encourage this ePet interaction. For instance, Pokémon: Let’s Go Pikachu and Let’s Go Eevee have a play feature in which the player can pet and feed their respective starter Pokémon using the touchscreen on the Nintendo Switch. However, games like Petz and Nintendogs, centered around the caring for a pet, no longer appear with such frequency on the video game market. Granted, Little Friends: Dogs & Cats did release on the Switch in 2019, a game that seemed to be a new version of the beloved Nintendogs series. However, the game has been met with average or unfavorable reviews, falling short of its predecessor. These ePet video games were largely a gaming fad of the 2000s, much like the contemporary virtual pet websites that boomed throughout the era. These games were products of their time and showcased the rapid changes in technology that manifested in consoles like the DS.
Nostalgia and the Virtual Pet Genre
The virtual pet genre stretches from the late 1990s through the 2010s and reflects the technological changes that were occurring in these decades. What unites works in this genre is their focus on raising and caring for pets and the games’ inherent open-endedness. There is no set goal for the player, no way to “beat” the game. The games are enjoyable because, at their heart, they are about spending time with a pet. The player may set individual goals for themselves within each game, but there is no path to completion or mastery. Someone could play thousands of hours of any of these games and still have endless things to do.
Virtual pet games are no longer in fashion. Today, children more often play battle- or social-based games like Fortnite, Among Us, Roblox, or Minecraft in which they play in multiplayer servers without the need for any digital pets. I do not mean to say that the games of the early 2000s were better than the games that children today play. There is nothing that makes these virtual pet games “better” than the popular games of the 2020s. Virtual pet games were a product of their time, as any video game is, yet they offered a unique experience for children of the 2000s. Too young for the newly-established social media platforms like MySpace, Twitter, and Facebook, children in the early 2000s turned toward virtual pet websites to enjoy and explore the interactivity, participation, and socialization that Web 2.0 offered. Though not necessarily social games, ePet games available on console allowed for further interactivity with rapidly-changing technology.
Today, games like Neopets, Webkinz, Petz, and Nintendogs are nostalgic and allow for young adults to relive their childhoods. As the poet Stephen Sexton has demonstrated in his collection If All the World and Love Were Young, video games are optimal vehicles for exploring memory, childhood, and longing. A video game stays relatively the same – give or take some updates – and therefore allows players to jump back in time, so to speak, to relive their past. The virtual pet phenomenon demonstrates the impact that rapid technological changes had on gaming and on the individuals who played and loved these games.
