Neopets was fun until the Scientologists took over.
Again, Neopets was never designed or managed or run by scientologists.
The people who owned/financed the website were scientologists, which wasn’t immediately known by The Neopets Team, who later made sure not an ounce of the ideals made it onto the site.
From an AMA with one of the original Neopets co-creators:
“We found out about it about 6 months after we started working there and started googling all the employees and they were all Scientologists,” Powell, who left the company alongside Williams shortly after Viacom took over because of creative differences, explained. “It was weird, we just didn’t mention it until they hired this lady who wanted to bring Scientology onto the site. We fought that as hard as we could and they got rid of her.” Williams likewise stated in her AMA: “At one time there was some talk about putting Scientology education on the site, but we killed that idea pretty sharpish. Adam and I made sure that it never made its way onto anything site related. Religion and politics were two big no nos for us as far as site content went. Can’t say the discussions we had to keep it that way were [sic] much fun though!”
People love being like “omg neopets was scientology propaganda!!!” But rest assured it was just a fun site that people worked really hard on!
It was the sale to Viacom that really began its end.
*shrug* whenever neocash started and getting banned for talking about your page design elements abutting… because you said butt.
my mum loves small talk so much it’s ridiculous, like she’ll say anything. one time we were at the cinema and the guy giving us our tickets had a beard and my mum just asked out of no where “how long are you gonna grow your beard?”
