The Neopets RPG doesn’t need mechanics, just your money

If you’ve been hanging around tabletop spaces for the past few weeks, you’ll probably have heard of the new Neopets roleplaying game, which is currently crowdfunding on Kickstarter. It’s fully funded and, according to Kicktraq, is trending towards an estimated $400,000 in pledges, or nearly 1000% of its starting goal. The Kickstarter page promises to recreate everything, and I literally mean everything, that was available online at Neopets in the early aughts. Puzzles, minigames, the Battledome, petpets, guilds, eggs, faeries, and paintbrushes—all of the weird little digital geegaws and obnoxious side-quests that were meant to sidetrack a child online for hours as their parents watched TV in the other room without having their ten-year-old bothering them to switch it to Cartoon Network. 

But missing from the declarative of the Kickstarter is any definitive explanation of the game itself, the design structure, the play loops, how combat, spells, or skills will work, or even who is in charge of writing this thing. The Neopets Tabletop RPG, despite the money its raking in, is setting itself up for failure. It will not last long, it will not make an impact, it will not be important. It will be just another box set that nostalgia-loving millennials and zillennials will put on their shelf, collecting dust. And the Kickstarter itself seems to know it. They need to make as much money as they can now, without sharing anything substantive, because it will never get any better than this. Right now, the Neopets RPG is the halcyon ideal of a game. The nostalgia of Neopia, totally removed from an actual product. This is it. It’s perfect, and if Geekify never ships out a playable game, or even a game, period, they will have done their job, which was to sell memories back to the masses.