Mine wasn't Neopets. It was Ultima Online emulators. UO launched in fall 1997 and it was a groundbreaking game. Emulators were quick to pick it up.
I mucked around with a few UOX3 servers before getting involved with one based on SphereServer around 1999. That quickly evolved into getting involved in the SphereServer project itself, written in C++, with its own scripting language and parser built in. I had to learn C++ for the code itself, parsing/scripting engine, and Linux to actually operate the servers. For months I didn't know what the `&` did after launching `sphere&` but knew players got mad if I forgot it [[they would get disconnected when my terminal inevitably got disconnected; sorry guys]].
Simultaneously, my high school was a partner with Microsoft in the pre-.NET 1.0 launch in 2000 and we got all new computers with Visual Studio. You could use registry explorer to copy the product key and the teacher let us borrow the installation CD. In late 2001, right before I graduated, we got the beta for Visual Studio .NET 1.0 from Microsoft and they gave us all individual licenses for 1.0 along with a few early books about .NET.
In mid 2002, RunUO was launched as the first C# event-driven emulator and took off. Those early C# patterns were rough but I learned more hacking on that for a year or two in college than I did in almost all of my college courses.
Tons of skills from all of this. Everything from packet debugging to storytelling when trying to replicate the roleplaying aspects on live emulated servers.
Every once in a blue moon I'll meet someone who can trace the genesis of their career to neopets. I learned to code from neopets. It started from html, then I fell into a cheats crowd, where I learned Visual Basic (some of the best early cheats were in Visual Basic).
Then one day, a guy coded a program in Python. It was only one with a "modern" style (it used Window XP styles, while most VB6 programs looked like windows 98 programs), and it used threads so it could watch multiple stores instead of having to manage multiple processes.
I must have been 12-13, and I was completely floored with it. I was convinced everyone programming in VB6 was wrong and the future was Python. I eventually self taught myself Python just to write my own cheats, which I eventually sold to others for millions of neopoints. Then my account got frozen and I moved on to other games.
Similar story to me. I was big into games and game design as a kid and was already doing some light modding of games but only a little programming. I experimented with using a memory editor to cheat on the Flash games in 6th grade, which promptly led to my account being banned. I was devastated and wanted revenge and swore I would write my own, sophisticated autobuyer bot. By mid 7th grade, I finished my project. I wrote it in REALBasic (was on a Mac). I implemented a barebones HTTP socket and cookie jar on top of the raw TCP socket provided by the language and learned to do all of that by sniffing my own network traffic and reading parts of the RFCs. I wrote rudimentary String parsing functions to parse the HTML results since I don't know Regex, and I also defeated the shop CAPTCHAs using a novel approach I have never seen anyone else use to this day. My bot worked phenomenally.
Fast forward to college, I re-implemented my bot as a pet project to learn Python. This time it was much better and included automatic selling of loot, automatic auctioning with feedback based pricing algorithms, and multiple account coordination for using a command and control server. I'm pretty sure I was the most sophisticated botter on the platform at the time. I had a very roundabout way to convert the loot into USD and was making around 7-10$/day completely passively.
Out of college I interviewed at a malware reverse engineering company. When you pass the interviews, they ask you to give a presentation before you get your offer. I chose to do a presentation about the bot (it was interesting from a security perspective)... big mistake. The VP of engineering was suddenly "pulled in to something" and I went home without an offer.
I’m in my mid-30’s now. In high school I learned HTML because I really wanted to customize the styling of my Guild (I think that’s what it was called).
And then built a neopets fan site and forum which taught me basic business (trading links with other fan sites, hiring/managing forum moderators, and eventually sold the fan site during junior year).
The will to customize my MySpace profile was also a driver for learning HTML.
I sometimes think about this in the context of today’s highly controlled platforms that simply don’t make space for users to customize or do anything outside the platform directly.
> in the context of today’s highly controlled platforms that simply don’t make space for users to customize or do anything outside the platform directly
There is Roblox, which is popular with kids and lets them upload minigames written in Lua.
I hung out with the neopets kids in school who were doing html stuff. I never really got into neopets myself but some of them were really into geocities which I totally clicked with. Some of my friends were artsy so I made pages for webcomics and CYOA games (with hand drawn graphics to accompany). Those friends ended up getting careers in the arts while I ended up as a computer/electrical engineer.
I followed this exact same path. Started with HTML for guilds, learning to slice PSDs and ended with learning VB6 to develop auto buyers / adopters :D Slopdog forums was my inspiration for using VB I think?
This is exactly how I got my start. Neocodex was the forum where I learned how to program, and slicing up images in CS2 to show up on a Tripod site was how I learned web development.
this is how i got my start in programming, eventually leading to working in finance and now in gamedev for a AAA. many of the programmers i worked with as a teenager to build neopets automations are in similar places. i have so many stories and even met my ex wife of ten years through the community!
oh and i regret all the duping glitches i found and exposed and stuff im sorry
I'll jump in too. Also started coding with HTML in Neopets and then joined the middle school's programming club! We were playing around with C++ and Visual Basic. Love seeing these updates!
Real talk, call me "old" - but it's like "Oh we get to be put on some list?". TLDR: They ruined the fucking internet. The internet sucks now, all those great "magical" experiences - they fucked it up. For all of us. Everyone.
You know there is one way to say a big "fuck you" to all this shit? I mean at least an idea I had?
What if you had physical "RSA" keys, you were part of groups, had to join, etc. Something like this...whatever. And you know how you use the internet? You literally send use data encrypted blogs in blobs. Keys change, ciphers change. Think 56k internet, but not "slow" - just blobbed/packageized.
In theory, you can basically just wrap the whole internet like a privatized radio relay - just much much faster and, global. The internet becomes only a packet relayer. Custom cryptogrphically rotated black box to anyone except keys in theory. Try and surveil that fuck shit mother fuckers.
The internet could at least fucking exist in some form. You could even have this "public" type AI-VERFIER "resigned/hashed packet" that uses some open source community checker that can be this trust based "thing"...auditble that is basically saying there "there is no weird images, etc...or there is no whatever here" and this can be signed. ISP network layer would see something like:
[VERIFIED CHECK]
fsdf34234ASDFsdfDataBLOB
Or go "naked"
fuckyou_fsdf34234ASDFsdfDataBLOB
In theory, it would at least try and prevent the NSA/INSERT_GOV_TER_ORG_HERE from at least respectfully trying to decrypt the "risky" packets. Blah blah blah. You know, just being kind to everyone I guess. Thanks.
I don't know...just an idea.
EDIT: There are of course other solutions related to end devices and comprised devices. The "simple" solution is offline, air gapped stable enviroments that handle all your decrypted / encrypted devices.
There there are network things, etc. All details - blah blah. But I am just talking shit. Someone should build this.
Similar technologies have been built and reinvented over and over again.
There is a critical mass of users needed to make this "social network", and turns out (big surprise) most people don't want or care about this technology.
I know. A man can dream you know? No one cares about anything. Well maybe they do, they care about "stuff". Just give them stuff... #congratulations_you_just_reinvitedx1000_INSERT_GOOD_BAD_IDEA_HERE
But thanks for the reply. At least someone has a fucking heartbeat and is real. lol
Serious question though, from a purely data analytical question - are you an incredible programmer? Like legit. Please tell me you're a badass. You gotta be? Real talk, rate yourself. I demand it.
You could say the same about anything, but cheating in multiplayer ruins the experience for others. Cheating in single-player? Great, we call those mods, but in a multiplayer game I'm happy to think of OP as a piece of shit for not just cheating but writing the cheats for others.
Even if it's just indirect competition, by giving yourself an advantage compared to others you affect what others percieve as a healthy benchmark for performance.
"Just neopets" isn't an excuse, you could say the same for any online game.
Cheaters even wreck just the scoreboards for some games. You might think a fake score submissions is about the least damaging thing since it doesn't directly effect others gameplay at all, but it still ruins the experience and affects the community's ability to compare and share genuine runs.
Being banned eventually is hardly a punishment, doubly so if they ever sold-on their ill-gotten gains for real money.
There wasn't a hint of contrition in OP's post, and the downvotes I'm receiving suggests that the culture of entitlement is so great now that cheating in multiplayer isn't even seen as bad anymore.
I hope you share that same energy for people doing high frequency trading or writing advertisement engines. Cheating in neopets is probably at the lowest end of harm caused by cheating and also hurts neopets devs more than it hurts other players.
I think it's reading into a lot into OPs comment. A lot of people look somewhat fondly on dumb/slightly illegal things they did as a teen, even if they would never do such a thing as an adult (nor encourage it in current teens). The downvotes you are getting are likely due to guidelines violations (be kind, curious, not snarky, etc) not due to your actual viewpoint.
That very well might be true for some of my family members, I'll have to ask. Perhaps not in terms of a career, but certainly in terms of computer literacy.
For me, it was the game Starseige:Tribes (1998), which had a (comparatively) phenomenal client-side scripting scene. I could learn the magic incantation, and now the HUD has a new box with a timer in it, or my character "speaks" new phrases--not intended by the designers--by interrupting existing canned phrases at the right times, etc.
There's something magical when skill-learning happens really close to a personal payoff from it.
Tribes 2 was basically a reimplementation of the major Internet protocols at the time... IRC for their chat rooms, newsgroups for the forums postings, profile pages was kindof proto-myspace, joining a "tribe" had obvious Unix groups parallels.
Is it the gigantic, sparse levels made out of 10 polygons per square mile?
I only played the game for a few months 27 years ago but it has stuck with me. I don't know if I've ever found a game that was that compelling and fun. But then again, I haven't really given any of the modern games a shot and mostly gave up with the FPS genre after team fortress classic fell out of favor
Neopets was also my first introduction to any sort of programming. Customizing your shop and guild pages with basic HTML and CSS was the first programming I ever did. I remember fondly adding MIDI music snippets as well that you could copy-paste in, all to increase the curb-appeal of your shop so you could sell your omelettes.
I had a very similar experience. Writing the HTML to spruce up the homepage of my Neopets guild was my first introduction to any website creation or programming.
Love this, I learned to code via a combination of neopets and MySpace. I made tiny animations in bootlegged versions of flash and then imported them as iframes, it was such a fun way to be creative and build stuff online
I also credit Neopets, but it was really the confluence of Neopets, MySpace, Geocities/Tripod, Xanga, etc. that really formed the base for so much of my career.
It’s really funny seeing everybody here talk about how Neopets taught them HTML/introduced them to coding, and all I can think about was how it taught me about “immersive advertising”!
Neopets wasn't really ABOUT programming. It was just a game for kids. It so happened that there were a lot of dull, repetitive tasks, or tasks that were best done at exact times, the sorts of things that programming could really help with. And there were places to stick some custom HTML for your profiles and such. It was a programming-shaped problem, and so a certain kind of child was happy to embrace programming because they had a problem to solve.
Scratch is ABOUT programming. It tells you "here is programming, you can make games and stuff," and that's neat, but it's a little different.
Neopets itself. Codepen and Khan Academy also let you share your HTML/CSS creations, and they add support for JS, but they don't have the game/pets elements that make coding petpages fun.
I never played this but I definitely got my start through a similar kind of tinkering. I'm glad I grew up in that era before so much interaction with technology started to be done on mobile or other locked down devices. And before "tinkering" would be reduced to rephrasing prompts.
Mine wasn't Neopets. It was Ultima Online emulators. UO launched in fall 1997 and it was a groundbreaking game. Emulators were quick to pick it up.
I mucked around with a few UOX3 servers before getting involved with one based on SphereServer around 1999. That quickly evolved into getting involved in the SphereServer project itself, written in C++, with its own scripting language and parser built in. I had to learn C++ for the code itself, parsing/scripting engine, and Linux to actually operate the servers. For months I didn't know what the `&` did after launching `sphere&` but knew players got mad if I forgot it [[they would get disconnected when my terminal inevitably got disconnected; sorry guys]].
Simultaneously, my high school was a partner with Microsoft in the pre-.NET 1.0 launch in 2000 and we got all new computers with Visual Studio. You could use registry explorer to copy the product key and the teacher let us borrow the installation CD. In late 2001, right before I graduated, we got the beta for Visual Studio .NET 1.0 from Microsoft and they gave us all individual licenses for 1.0 along with a few early books about .NET.
In mid 2002, RunUO was launched as the first C# event-driven emulator and took off. Those early C# patterns were rough but I learned more hacking on that for a year or two in college than I did in almost all of my college courses.
Tons of skills from all of this. Everything from packet debugging to storytelling when trying to replicate the roleplaying aspects on live emulated servers.
Ultima Online emulator history: https://www.uox3.org/history/timeline.txt
Every once in a blue moon I'll meet someone who can trace the genesis of their career to neopets. I learned to code from neopets. It started from html, then I fell into a cheats crowd, where I learned Visual Basic (some of the best early cheats were in Visual Basic).
Then one day, a guy coded a program in Python. It was only one with a "modern" style (it used Window XP styles, while most VB6 programs looked like windows 98 programs), and it used threads so it could watch multiple stores instead of having to manage multiple processes.
I must have been 12-13, and I was completely floored with it. I was convinced everyone programming in VB6 was wrong and the future was Python. I eventually self taught myself Python just to write my own cheats, which I eventually sold to others for millions of neopoints. Then my account got frozen and I moved on to other games.
Similar story to me. I was big into games and game design as a kid and was already doing some light modding of games but only a little programming. I experimented with using a memory editor to cheat on the Flash games in 6th grade, which promptly led to my account being banned. I was devastated and wanted revenge and swore I would write my own, sophisticated autobuyer bot. By mid 7th grade, I finished my project. I wrote it in REALBasic (was on a Mac). I implemented a barebones HTTP socket and cookie jar on top of the raw TCP socket provided by the language and learned to do all of that by sniffing my own network traffic and reading parts of the RFCs. I wrote rudimentary String parsing functions to parse the HTML results since I don't know Regex, and I also defeated the shop CAPTCHAs using a novel approach I have never seen anyone else use to this day. My bot worked phenomenally.
Fast forward to college, I re-implemented my bot as a pet project to learn Python. This time it was much better and included automatic selling of loot, automatic auctioning with feedback based pricing algorithms, and multiple account coordination for using a command and control server. I'm pretty sure I was the most sophisticated botter on the platform at the time. I had a very roundabout way to convert the loot into USD and was making around 7-10$/day completely passively.
Out of college I interviewed at a malware reverse engineering company. When you pass the interviews, they ask you to give a presentation before you get your offer. I chose to do a presentation about the bot (it was interesting from a security perspective)... big mistake. The VP of engineering was suddenly "pulled in to something" and I went home without an offer.
I have a sincere feeling that they missed out.
Same here!
I’m in my mid-30’s now. In high school I learned HTML because I really wanted to customize the styling of my Guild (I think that’s what it was called).
And then built a neopets fan site and forum which taught me basic business (trading links with other fan sites, hiring/managing forum moderators, and eventually sold the fan site during junior year).
The will to customize my MySpace profile was also a driver for learning HTML.
I sometimes think about this in the context of today’s highly controlled platforms that simply don’t make space for users to customize or do anything outside the platform directly.
> in the context of today’s highly controlled platforms that simply don’t make space for users to customize or do anything outside the platform directly
There is Roblox, which is popular with kids and lets them upload minigames written in Lua.
There must still be a use case for this in the modern web. TikTok with custom HTML perhaps…
I hung out with the neopets kids in school who were doing html stuff. I never really got into neopets myself but some of them were really into geocities which I totally clicked with. Some of my friends were artsy so I made pages for webcomics and CYOA games (with hand drawn graphics to accompany). Those friends ended up getting careers in the arts while I ended up as a computer/electrical engineer.
I followed this exact same path. Started with HTML for guilds, learning to slice PSDs and ended with learning VB6 to develop auto buyers / adopters :D Slopdog forums was my inspiration for using VB I think?
This is exactly how I got my start. Neocodex was the forum where I learned how to program, and slicing up images in CS2 to show up on a Tripod site was how I learned web development.
this is how i got my start in programming, eventually leading to working in finance and now in gamedev for a AAA. many of the programmers i worked with as a teenager to build neopets automations are in similar places. i have so many stories and even met my ex wife of ten years through the community!
oh and i regret all the duping glitches i found and exposed and stuff im sorry
I'll jump in too. Also started coding with HTML in Neopets and then joined the middle school's programming club! We were playing around with C++ and Visual Basic. Love seeing these updates!
yup neopets was also my first contact with programming because I wanted to have a cool website.
put it aside for years and eventually became a programmer later in life
@nemothekid This is the Neopets king right here. I remember millions being a lot, I was always Neopoor, game and real life apparently.
My hacks were shit before I had hair on my balls, you know? But I tried. VBasic....when Microsoft didn't suck. XP 4 LYFE...ride or die
Wanna be in my guild bro?
Best, Prototype #52ASB_ADS_ALPHA_A+
"Wanna be in my guild bro?"
Real talk, call me "old" - but it's like "Oh we get to be put on some list?". TLDR: They ruined the fucking internet. The internet sucks now, all those great "magical" experiences - they fucked it up. For all of us. Everyone.
You know there is one way to say a big "fuck you" to all this shit? I mean at least an idea I had?
What if you had physical "RSA" keys, you were part of groups, had to join, etc. Something like this...whatever. And you know how you use the internet? You literally send use data encrypted blogs in blobs. Keys change, ciphers change. Think 56k internet, but not "slow" - just blobbed/packageized.
In theory, you can basically just wrap the whole internet like a privatized radio relay - just much much faster and, global. The internet becomes only a packet relayer. Custom cryptogrphically rotated black box to anyone except keys in theory. Try and surveil that fuck shit mother fuckers.
The internet could at least fucking exist in some form. You could even have this "public" type AI-VERFIER "resigned/hashed packet" that uses some open source community checker that can be this trust based "thing"...auditble that is basically saying there "there is no weird images, etc...or there is no whatever here" and this can be signed. ISP network layer would see something like:
[VERIFIED CHECK] fsdf34234ASDFsdfDataBLOB
Or go "naked" fuckyou_fsdf34234ASDFsdfDataBLOB
In theory, it would at least try and prevent the NSA/INSERT_GOV_TER_ORG_HERE from at least respectfully trying to decrypt the "risky" packets. Blah blah blah. You know, just being kind to everyone I guess. Thanks.
I don't know...just an idea.
EDIT: There are of course other solutions related to end devices and comprised devices. The "simple" solution is offline, air gapped stable enviroments that handle all your decrypted / encrypted devices.
There there are network things, etc. All details - blah blah. But I am just talking shit. Someone should build this.
Similar technologies have been built and reinvented over and over again.
There is a critical mass of users needed to make this "social network", and turns out (big surprise) most people don't want or care about this technology.
I know. A man can dream you know? No one cares about anything. Well maybe they do, they care about "stuff". Just give them stuff... #congratulations_you_just_reinvitedx1000_INSERT_GOOD_BAD_IDEA_HERE
But thanks for the reply. At least someone has a fucking heartbeat and is real. lol
Serious question though, from a purely data analytical question - are you an incredible programmer? Like legit. Please tell me you're a badass. You gotta be? Real talk, rate yourself. I demand it.
[flagged]
They didn't say they were proud, plus their account got banned so they were punished appropriately, plus... It's just Neopets...
You could say the same about anything, but cheating in multiplayer ruins the experience for others. Cheating in single-player? Great, we call those mods, but in a multiplayer game I'm happy to think of OP as a piece of shit for not just cheating but writing the cheats for others.
Even if it's just indirect competition, by giving yourself an advantage compared to others you affect what others percieve as a healthy benchmark for performance.
"Just neopets" isn't an excuse, you could say the same for any online game.
Cheaters even wreck just the scoreboards for some games. You might think a fake score submissions is about the least damaging thing since it doesn't directly effect others gameplay at all, but it still ruins the experience and affects the community's ability to compare and share genuine runs.
Being banned eventually is hardly a punishment, doubly so if they ever sold-on their ill-gotten gains for real money.
There wasn't a hint of contrition in OP's post, and the downvotes I'm receiving suggests that the culture of entitlement is so great now that cheating in multiplayer isn't even seen as bad anymore.
I hope you share that same energy for people doing high frequency trading or writing advertisement engines. Cheating in neopets is probably at the lowest end of harm caused by cheating and also hurts neopets devs more than it hurts other players.
I think it's reading into a lot into OPs comment. A lot of people look somewhat fondly on dumb/slightly illegal things they did as a teen, even if they would never do such a thing as an adult (nor encourage it in current teens). The downvotes you are getting are likely due to guidelines violations (be kind, curious, not snarky, etc) not due to your actual viewpoint.
i was 12 sorry lol
[dead]
That very well might be true for some of my family members, I'll have to ask. Perhaps not in terms of a career, but certainly in terms of computer literacy.
For me, it was the game Starseige:Tribes (1998), which had a (comparatively) phenomenal client-side scripting scene. I could learn the magic incantation, and now the HUD has a new box with a timer in it, or my character "speaks" new phrases--not intended by the designers--by interrupting existing canned phrases at the right times, etc.
There's something magical when skill-learning happens really close to a personal payoff from it.
Something about starseige:Tribes was just so primordial.
I still occasionally have dreams of various Tribes levels.
Same with Descent - I swear there is an alternative universe where my soul is adrift in that space, recently ejected from my ship ..
Tribes 2 was basically a reimplementation of the major Internet protocols at the time... IRC for their chat rooms, newsgroups for the forums postings, profile pages was kindof proto-myspace, joining a "tribe" had obvious Unix groups parallels.
Tribes 2 was the only game that I ever played regularly for multiple years. I jones for skiing to this day.
Is it the gigantic, sparse levels made out of 10 polygons per square mile?
I only played the game for a few months 27 years ago but it has stuck with me. I don't know if I've ever found a game that was that compelling and fun. But then again, I haven't really given any of the modern games a shot and mostly gave up with the FPS genre after team fortress classic fell out of favor
Neopets feels like the kind of website that couldn't be made today. How do we get back to that web?
Neopets was also my first introduction to any sort of programming. Customizing your shop and guild pages with basic HTML and CSS was the first programming I ever did. I remember fondly adding MIDI music snippets as well that you could copy-paste in, all to increase the curb-appeal of your shop so you could sell your omelettes.
neopets also changed my life. some a-hole stole my account and after that, elementary school me became deeply conscious of infosec.
I had a very similar experience. Writing the HTML to spruce up the homepage of my Neopets guild was my first introduction to any website creation or programming.
Ragnarok Online private servers communities did pretty much the same for me. We were very die-hard on PHP, MySQL, C and ancient JS/CSS.
Love this, I learned to code via a combination of neopets and MySpace. I made tiny animations in bootlegged versions of flash and then imported them as iframes, it was such a fun way to be creative and build stuff online
I also credit Neopets, but it was really the confluence of Neopets, MySpace, Geocities/Tripod, Xanga, etc. that really formed the base for so much of my career.
This kicked the memories back to playing Alien Adoption Agency with friends in my middle school computer lab class.
It’s really funny seeing everybody here talk about how Neopets taught them HTML/introduced them to coding, and all I can think about was how it taught me about “immersive advertising”!
It also taught me about savings account interest rates!
Remind me of how immersive advertising worked in neopets?
Corporate sponsors all over the place. Sponsored/themed games in particular. It basically existed for brands to market to kids.
That came later. Didn't have those earlier on.
Unless Extreme Potato Counter was sponsored by Big Potato...
What is the closest analogy for kids these days? https://scratch.mit.edu ?
Neopets wasn't really ABOUT programming. It was just a game for kids. It so happened that there were a lot of dull, repetitive tasks, or tasks that were best done at exact times, the sorts of things that programming could really help with. And there were places to stick some custom HTML for your profiles and such. It was a programming-shaped problem, and so a certain kind of child was happy to embrace programming because they had a problem to solve.
Scratch is ABOUT programming. It tells you "here is programming, you can make games and stuff," and that's neat, but it's a little different.
Neopets itself. Codepen and Khan Academy also let you share your HTML/CSS creations, and they add support for JS, but they don't have the game/pets elements that make coding petpages fun.
Roblox, maybe? They do have scripting, but I have no clue if it's something kids do or not https://create.roblox.com/docs/tutorials/use-case-tutorials/...
Neopets is still around! TIL they’re independent again as of 2023.
Discord music player bots and automod scripts.
I never played this but I definitely got my start through a similar kind of tinkering. I'm glad I grew up in that era before so much interaction with technology started to be done on mobile or other locked down devices. And before "tinkering" would be reduced to rephrasing prompts.