The Original Virtual Pet Website Is Charging Forward on Neopets Revival with Support of Flash Emulator Ruffle
LOS ANGELES, Sept. 7, 2023 /PRNewswire/ – Neopets is partnering with Flash emulator Ruffle to bring back its catalog of minigames, with more than 100 minigames now available to play. The move, initially suggested by the player community, solidifies Neopets’ commitment to reviving the brand with community-motivated projects, with a primary focus on the iconic website that brought together millions of passionate players. The virtual pet website saw a 5-year peak in online traffic based on month-over-month data in July of this year, following significant changes to the brand’s structure and direction.
The aforementioned changes saw Neopets announce its independence as a company and unveil a new leadership team dedicated to bringing back the esteemed site to its glory days. There has been a 60% jump in monthly active Neopets users since these changes were announced. The brand has worked closely with the team at Ruffle in the wake of the announcement to rectify its Flash-related site issues, and has joined a robust panel of Diamond-level sponsors to support Ruffle’s ongoing success.
“For a large portion of our community, minigames are a core component of what makes Neopets what it is,” said Dominic Law, CEO of Neopets. “In our original list of our promises, we set out a goal to bring back 50 minigames. We have quickly been able to build on that number and continue to work on site fixes daily, which wouldn’t be possible without the support we’ve received from Ruffle.”
Ruffle detects all existing Flash content on a website and automatically “polyfills” it into a Ruffle player, allowing seamless and transparent website upgrades for legacy brands like Neopets. As a Diamond sponsor, Neopets will provide Ruffle with monthly support to help ensure both platforms can continue to thrive.
“We are thrilled to play a role in Neopets’ new direction and brand revival with our backend support,” said Sammie McPhail, Director at Ruffle. “We have seen firsthand from our community an eager demand to restore Neopets.com to its best, and are proud to leverage our expertise to do so quickly and efficiently.”
This partnership is an exciting step forward for the new leadership team in furthering their public pledge to foster more community-led development by increasing transparency and engaging in more two-way conversations with the player community. The brand even hosted its first live AMA (Ask Me Anything) with CEO Dominic Law on September 6th. Neopets fans were invited to join, ask questions, and participate in a live giveaway. A first for the brand, this event was yet another step the new leadership team is taking to make good on their pledge to the fans.
Neopets and Ruffle continue to work diligently to address user requests, identify areas needing attention and update the classic site with performance and game-related fixes. To stay up-to-date on the latest news from Neopets, please visit Neopets.com.
Neopets is an immersive, online virtual pet game in which players can adopt, customize, and interact with Neopets in the vast world of Neopia. Known for its multi-generational, passionate community, Neopets offers players a vast world of storytelling, collecting, pet care, and exciting social gaming experiences. Since its launch in 1999, Neopets has galvanised unique adventures, games, stories, and challenges for over 150 million players worldwide.
Ruffle is a Flash Player emulator written in Rust. Ruffle runs natively on all modern operating systems as a standalone application, and on all modern browsers through the use of WebAssembly. Ruffle puts Flash back on the web, where it belongs – including browsers on iOS and Android! Ruffle is an entirely open-source project maintained by volunteers. We’re all passionate about the preservation of internet history, and we were drawn to working on this project to help preserve the many websites and plethora of content that will no longer be accessible when users can no longer run the official Flash Player. If you would like to help support this project, we welcome all contributions of any kind – even if it’s just playing some old games and seeing how well they run.
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SOURCE Neopets
Featured image: Megapixl © Photoquest
