Neopets CEO Responds to World Video Game Hall of Fame Nomination [EXCLUSIVE]

The Strong Museum of Play in Rochester, New York announced in mid-March its nominees for induction into the World Video Game Hall of Fame. Among those that might be memorialized in 2024 is Neopets, a browser game from 1999 enjoying a moment in the spotlight ahead of its 25th anniversary.

Since Neopets secured its independence from former owners at NetDragon, the game has been enjoying a renaissance, growing in active players over the past year while hundreds of the classic minigames have been brought back to life through a combination of reconstruction and Flash emulation. The game is even releasing two new mobile games and a card game in partnership with Upper Deck ahead of its November 15 anniversary. Against that backdrop, the Strong Museum has shined a spotlight on the game’s quarter-century legacy.

The Video Game Hall of Fame

Neopets’ CEO Dominic Law found out about its nomination during a recent interview with Game Rant and shared his immediate reaction.

I didn’t know about that! I’m definitely excited! I mean, I think it’s more of a collective effort for the IP. I would probably attribute all this success and turnaround to the team and to the community. It’s exciting if we get awarded. Just being nominated, I think, is a huge honor that shows that there’s something very unique about
Neopets
and the whole
Neopets
community. It’s exciting that we’re seeing that a lot of us are coming back together.

Neopets faces competition from 11 other legends of gaming history, like the original Metroid, SimCity, Resident Evil, and Ultima, as well as Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, Asteroids, Elite, Guitar Hero, Tokimeki Memorial, Myst, and You Don’t Know Jack, the precursor to Jackbox Party Pack. The twelve nominees come from thousands suggested for the 2024 class. Each title has been a fundamental influence in gaming history and deserves to be memorialized, but not all will earn a space in the tenth class of inductees. Voting was conducted for a week in late March, polling experts on the influence of gaming on culture. The final selection, typically of four games, will be announced on May 9 at the ESL Digital Worlds Exhibit.

On top of that is the storied legacy of the game over the years. Law touts how influential his game has been for decades of players and its place as part of history. Law calls Neopets a “living historical relic” from the days of the early internet, being lovingly restored by the dedicated team he helms. Part of that restoration is rebuilding the site’s famous Flash minigames in HTML or Flash emulators, and through saved data, the company has preserved pets and accomplishments as a sort of time capsule for lapsed players.

Neopets
is a game that has actually changed a lot of people’s lives and inspired a generation of kids who played it…We basically kept the purest form of it alive–it’s like a living historical relic. It’s a great time for you to come back, enjoy, and explore something that’s so significant in gaming industry history, but also this journey that we can potentially see the renaissance of something, a great revival of a great IP, is going to be a hell of a journey.

He also describes the meteoric rise of the revitalized Neopets as an equally historic attempt to revive an IP. That’s supported by new mobile games and a new trading card game developed in partnership with Upper Deck. For a project run by a museum for gaming, those two factors would likely be a benefit to a potential inductee. If inducted, Neopets would join games like Pong, Microsoft Solitaire, Final Fantasy 7, and The Last of Us in representing the most influential video games in history. In the case of Neopets, that influence was deeply personal for Law.

Neopets’ Legacy is Personal to Its CEO

Law was born in Toronto, Ontario, but moved from Canada to Hong Kong at a young age. It was the early days of the consumer internet, an era of landlines and payphones, where Silent Hill was about to revolutionize horror games and where communicating across an ocean was an expensive ordeal. All of this is to say that a lot of modern conveniences did not exist at this time, as many of Neopets‘ original players may recall. Law can, as he was able to visit his friends in Toronto shortly after the launch of Neopets in 1999, and the game was like a miracle for international communication.

All my friends were playing it, and then they introduced me to it. I used that game mainly for social play, so it’s the early internet environment for me as well. It’s a game that connected me with my childhood friends. We’d been able to explore the world of Neopia during those times, and that’s what kept our friendship together…The kids that played it back then, it opened the door of the internet to them.
Neopets
was opening a whole new world to our generation.

Law also explained that, when Neopets found popularity in Hong Kong years later, his experience with the game gave him a certain air of coolness among friends closer to home, which further ingrained the adoptable game into his experience of youth. For Law and many in his generation, Neopets was part of what the early years of consumer internet were. It was the first real experience of living in a global community, interacting with people from around the world in an inherently games-to-make-friends/”>social game. He credits much of Neopets’ longevity to the loyalty of the community that came together in those early years, people who grew up as Neopians.

He also credits those years with his crowning career achievement: becoming CEO of the very game that connected him to his friends decades ago.

It feels like a childhood dream come true! To be honest, I played a lot of games, but
Neopets
is one of the games that holds a very important place. As kids do, I thought it would be fun to run a game studio or that it’d be fun to work on these games that I like. Those dreams have always been in the back of my mind. When we were able to successfully spin it off and really lead the charge on reviving this
Neopets
IP, it’s actually very, very exciting for me. I think it’s probably the most rewarding moment in my career so far.

Law achieved that dream by first working with NetDragon, the then-owner of Neopets. NetDragon had grouped the pet game with its educational games and had been pursuing Neopet NFTs as a hot trend in game development and monetization, which saw massive backlash from the game’s fanbase. Seeing the potential for a revival of the classic IP, Law worked with NetDragon to spin Neopets off into its own independent studio under his guidance. He left Web3 aspirations behind and focused on the revitalization project that has seen success over the past year.