THE CATACOMBS - While working on a project recently to find information on
old Neopian Times issues, I have found myself wandering a hazy, twisting maze
filled with fascinating gems of information. Either that, or I've been tossed
into a six car garage that's filled with miscellaneous junk from the last generation
or so.
What am I talking about? Well, it's like this: Neopets has been around since
November 15th, 1999. For those of us who are relatively new to it (say, in the
last year), the early days of Neopets is an unknown era filled with all sorts
of surprises for anyone who tries to find those old records.
The first examples that comes to mind are the Neopets species themselves,
and their appearance. How many of Neopia's 30 million (plus) account users know
that the Bruce was originally a photograph of a human man? Or that a cartoon
of a pop singer was another species, known as the Macy Gray? She got turned
into a Kau to avoid legal troubles. (Which might say something about Macy Gray,
but I'd rather not speculate further on that.)
A current user will find out soon about Eyries, but how about the Cerpull,
or the Tatsu? And yet those were the earlier versions of the species which eventually
evolved into Eyries. Polypups became Gelerts, Fuzios became Kyriis, and Fleyes
became the Buzz that we know of today. The picture of the Fleye was an eyeball
with wings. It's hard to imagine what its expressions must have been!
Everyone knows about Lupes wanting to eat Chias, but who knows that the original
story about Chia-eating mentioned Wockys instead? Or that Lupes weren't even
one of the "original" species, but were in fact introduced a little later- in
mid to late January of 2000?
Looking into the news, we also find where Donna, who was the first artist
and helped start Neopets, has her birthday on December 10th. She will be twenty
four this coming December. Looking back, we find her being a month shy of her
twenty first birthday when Neopets first went online! I'm not even thirty myself,
but when I read that sort of thing it makes me feel old before my time.
The Neopian Times was first published on January 25th, 2000. Although it started
out on a weekly basis, it managed to totally skip the month of April, for whatever
reasons, and only one edition made it out in May. The first issues were a far
cry from the slick scripting that we see today, and the volume and quality of
work published in it does not even come close to comparing to the huge load
of well-crafted stories and comics that we get each week now.
What are totems? And why would you need them to get to Mystery Island? And
yet, there are the records, telling us of the first days on Mystery Island when
the trip there was taken only by those lucky few who knew how to get the "totems"
they needed. Once they got there, they discovered a new species of Neopet- one
which is common today. It was created especially for release on Mystery Island.
The pound was created for public use on June 30th, 2000. The original person
at the "abandon" station was not a yellow Techo with gray hair. It was a woman
with too much weight, too much purple lipstick, and a permanent sneer fixed
in place. A truly formidable obstacle known to all Neopia as "Ms. Worley." A
blue Blumaroo was the adoption pet, and they both got replaced on January 30th,
2001. One wonders what happened to them...
By now many of you may be wondering where I got this information. Answer? Most
of it came from the old editions of the news! Check
it out and see for yourself what other trivia you can dig up. There
are problems with it, of course. Many of the links to "exciting new stuff" are
now broken, since the exciting new things are now used up and gone, buried and
forgotten in the continuing changes of Neopets. Images may have changed, occasionally
resulting in a missing picture link, but just as often resulting in a more recent
picture being substituted for the older one.
The real fun is when you find a new (to you) area of the site that isn't active
anymore. For every broken link, you can find another leading you to such a thing
as Dr. Frank Sloth's "question and answer" column, where he replies to various
letters submitted to him by Neopets players.
More often, it could simply be an interesting item of news. We see a big deal
made when two or three new colours are released for pets, but there was one
day in early Neopian times when no less than ONE HUNDRED new pet colours were
released!
And don't forget The Neopian Times itself. Although the first few issues are
no longer online, what's left still spans a lot of Neopian history. The articles
can show a fascinating glimpse of economic conditions then- and what people
thought about them.
Another resource is various Neopets-related Web sites elsewhere. While I can't
give you any exact addresses, a hunt for terms such as Cerpull, Tatsu, and other
things associated with Neopets' early days will be a good way to find them.
Some of those Web sites are now inactive, becoming the net equivalent of fossils
as their static, unchanged pages preserve for a while the moment(s) in time
when their owners finally quit working on them.
So become a detective in your own right. Start digging through the sometimes
fragmented, incomplete, and confusing records that have been left to us from
the past. A far distant past, one of two or three years ago, when Neopians were
numbered in the thousands and not the millions, when the hottest new craze was
theme parks, when books were cheaper than dirt, and when you hadn't yet found
out that your Mel was fated to become a Mynci instead.
Who knows what you might find? Not even the Shadow Usul knows that.... | 
