Now perpetually broken, thanks to Adobe ending support of Flash at the end of 2020, Neopets lacks the features that made it a huge success. Neopets is the create-a-pet website that launched in 1999 and quickly became a generation’s favorite childhood hangout - centered around the care of said pets. A few Neopets users have pointed to Klyko’s heist and return as the start of a chain that’s kicked off reversals that impacted hundreds of Neopets. Over the past few months, users like Amanda have found themselves caught up in the game’s black market, and the Neopets team has been forced to respond in a way that’s been unheard of in the community. Neopets retain their names in trades, so she could tell he was still out there somewhere.Įventually, Amanda got Klyko back on her account, thanks to a process called “trade reversals.” That process requires the Neopets’ staff undo a whole chain of transactions until a pet is returned to its rightful owner. Amanda told Polygon over Neomail that Klyko had been stolen from her account (perhaps due to Neopets’ notoriously bad security) and passed around in trades - both legitimate and otherwise - for about a month. Sitting idle for a year, Klyko had somehow been stolen from Amanda’s account and shuffled into the Neopets black market, an economy driven by the user-generated value of rare, unconverted Neopets. Now, Neopets has a supply shortage of these unconverted pets that’s created this quick-moving economy wracked with illicit pet trading. This change unintentionally made unconverted pets very rare, propping up a new value system based on scarcity driven by the Neopets community. The majority of Neopets’ pets were automatically converted to the new art style, which added a feature that let players customize pets with clothes, props, and backgrounds. But some creatures, like the Darigan Lupe, kept their original designs, in this case retaining the old, static poses. Back in 2007, Neopets got an overhaul that changed the majority of its artwork.

Klyko is devilishly cute, but that’s not where its value lies. Amanda’s Lupe, who she nicknamed Klyko, is not a regular pet it’s an “unconverted” Neopet that’s massively rare on Neopets. What was missing was Amanda’s Darigan Lupe - a dark purple canine with glowing red eyes and dragon’s wings. Neopets always tries guilt-tripping lapsed players like this, and usually it’s effective, but there was one problem here. A bubblegum-striped tiger was crying and upset that she had left it unattended for so long. After leaving Neopets for a year, Amanda logged into her account and noticed that something was off.

Neopets yellow paintbrush