The Obscurity of Petpet Park
If you were a kid between the 2000’s and 2010’s, you might remember online games like Club Penguin, Neopets, Petpet Park, Toontown, Wizard 101, Habbo and various others like them. Most of these have since closed down but some are still accessible (I mean it varies depending on which game it is but some are still playable-I just don’t know which or by how much).
Petpet Park is kind of a weird case because it was a spin off of Neopets (as in, created by the same people) and Neopets is still very much active but Petpet Park was purchased and shut down by Jumpstart in 2014 (I’ve never played it but there was also Monkey Quest which was accessible via Nickelodeon’s game website (which is either gone or not the same-haven’t looked in years) and that was also shut down around the same time as Petpet Park but I don’t know if it was also purchased by Jumpstart or if it shut down for different reasons).
Another oddity about it is Neopets (as far as I can tell) has vas and active fanbase with a fandom that’s been around since it’s creation (and with fans of different ages might add!). Please forgive me if I’m wrong but I would guess the size of Neopets’ fanbase is comparable to that of Club Penguin’s. Probably more so, considering how long it’s been active.
That being said, you’d think Neopet fans would carry over to Petpet Park and I’m sure that was the case for some but I don’t really know. I was thirteen myself when I started playing it and I only knew (maybe?) two people who also played it. If my memories of 2010’s internet are anything to go by, there were quite a few other fans (most likely teens and preteens, I really don’t know if adults were into the game) so there was a fandom-ish(?) thing but fan made content from that time is…Well.
There is SOME fan made content (fan art and maybe one or two fanfics?) but most of it was made in the 2010s by young fans-which is not nor is ever a bad thing necessarily! It just means the content may be a mixed bag childhood nostalgia and trying out fan fiction for the very first time.
Hey, you have to start off somewhere right? And this stuff was made WITHOUT the use of AI! The fans who made that content literally did more than ANY AI bot user does!
Back to now though! It’s hard to find any new fan-made content. You might find something somewhere (tumblr, or FanFiction) but you’d have to dig to find it and it may be under Neopet tags. I think this reflects more about the game’s closing than it does the fandom though. If my math is right, the youngest players of Petpet Park from 2014 would be nineteen or twenty by now (assuming they were seven or eight when they played and that’s if they even remember the game at all! I barely remember being that little!).
To understand what I’m about to say next, I think I need to explain the game a little bit here: Like Club Penguin, you create your own petpet character and can interact with other players and play games (either by yourself or with others) but unlike Club Penguin (and I do not know if any other games did this at this time but!) you could click on non-playable characters in the game and they’d interact with you (not really but sort of) and the quests you’d do often required you to go around the park and gather items for the character.
Some of these quests had a storyline or were part of a preexisting one and had multiple parts to them. These storylines offered a bit of lore to the park itself, the areas involved in the quest or even involved the characters in the quest and by doing the quest, you (the player!) got to be involved in it as well.
It was all made up and pre-written and made behind the scenes and you weren’t actually talking to the characters but it really made you feel connected to the characters and to the world of Petpet Park. These quests were usually adventurous, maybe mystery-drama, nothing scary or involving any real-life themes or scenarios but fun and it was always satisfying to just be part of it.
It was also how you got to know the characters of the game. You could and still can find information about the characters online but a lot of these quests hinted at more complexity to the characters (even if it was just the way they’d respond to a response option). At the time it was so much fun but (depending on how old you were back then) you didn’t really get a chance to appreciate it.
This is what makes finding or creating fan content so difficult. As much as I and other fans loved Petpet Park, it has been twelve years since it closed. A lot has happened the world and our personal lives since then. We may want to write or post about Petpet Park but all we have to go off of is our memories, YouTube videos, and archived website pages (remember the Jellyneo guides from back then? It had all the quest guides and item information on it? Yeah, it’s only accessible via the WayBack Machine now).
This, for me, is really frustrating because there are some characters in Petpet Park and storylines I’d like to revisit and explore just how complex they are or could have been but with so much gone and so little available, it’s difficult. And it’s not just that but some quests and storylines were either never released or fully flushed out before the park’s closure so what we do have may not even be complete.
I guess this is why Petpet Park is so obscure as a topic. Even remembering things from the game isn’t enough because without the resources needed to confirm them, you’re left stuck and not really sure what to do with it.
None of this means the Petpet Park fandom is gone though!
Petpet Park Rebuild is a Discord group that’s trying to rebuild Petpet Park (there’s also Park Preservation Society but I’m not sure what they do. Please correct me if I’m wrong or missing something else because I really don’t know! I am not affiliated with either of these groups) and there does seem to be some Petpet Park fans on tumblr. So yeah, we still exist!
Don’t know how to finish this post other than thank you for reading it if you did. 🫡
