Founders of “Niao Pet” Couple Enter the Web3 Game Space

In November 1999, a web-based virtual pet raising game called “Neopets” burst onto the scene, allowing players to nurture and take care of their cartoon pets, chat with them, and play games. Players could also trade various game items using the in-game virtual currency.

At that time, founders Adam Powell and Donna Williams were just students at the University of Nottingham, and their initial goal was simply to “keep university students entertained and possibly make some money through banner ads.”

At that time, internet technology was just beginning to become popular, and the competition for internet games was relatively low. The game was launched and immediately achieved great success. The explosive word-of-mouth and word-of-mouth recommendations made “Neo Pets” reach 600,000 daily players in less than a month. At its peak, the game had 140 million players and 5 billion views each month.

Just a few months later, “Neo Pets” received significant investment. With funding in place and a team assembled, Adam, however, was not doing well. Although he believed that game content was more important than profits, the pressure to generate revenue forced the team to shift their focus to inserting various sponsored advertisements within the game.

After being acquired and leaving “Neo Pets”, Adam co-founded the game studio Meteor Games with his longtime partner Donna Williams in 2007, releasing several commercially successful games such as “Paradise Island”, “Farmers’ War”, and “Ranch Town”. Notably, at its peak, “Paradise Island” had over 400,000 daily active players.

In 2020, with the popularity of blockchain games, Adam announced the development of a new game called Dragginz. This is a blockchain game built on the Internet Computer blockchain. The game is described as “Neopets meets Minecraft”, combining pet raising and an open world.

Although Dragginz did not gain fame alongside Adam and “Neo Pets”, it sparked a heated discussion in the IC community after the governance token SNS-1 rose from an initial price of 1 ICP to a historical high of 830 ICP, approaching the “myth of a thousandfold increase”. Almost all community members are eagerly anticipating the launch of the game, hoping it can compare to the original “Neo Pets”.

As Dominic Williams, the founder of the DFINITY Foundation, said: “Dragginz is a massive multiplayer online game developed by the team behind Neopets. Neopets was the first massive multiplayer online game with nearly a hundred million users. This was absolutely revolutionary at the time. I believe Dragginz will be very exciting as well. When the game officially enters the mainstream world, the total number of IC network users can quickly increase to millions.”

Game Content > Profit, considering making blockchain games since 2014

It should be said that Adam Powell was exposed to blockchain very early, at least before 2017.

In the eyes of Axie Infinity co-founder Jihoz, Adam is an early ETH Maximalist and is very optimistic about the development of DeFi. In 2018, he also expressed his optimism about Axie to Jihoz.

In 2017, on the Reddit subreddit of the early DeFi protocol 0x, a user named TommyEconomics posted that he had mistakenly added an extra zero to his order price, resulting in his order being executed with a loss of 500 ETH. He hoped that the counterparty of this trade could contact him and help rectify this mistake. Soon, a user with the username borovan replied, stating that he was one of the counterparties and was willing to return the 163 ETH received from the trade to TommyEconomics.

I have to say, the Crypto world can be very big at times, but it can also be very small.

At that time, TommyEconomics established Energi, a public chain focused on trading security.

And the counterparty borovan is actually Adam Powell.

Dialogue Donna:

Hello, Donna, it’s a pleasure to have a conversation with you. Could you introduce us to you and Adam, as well as the background of the team members?

Adam started programming games at the age of 5. He began with writing children’s game books, then moved on to developing MUD-type games, and later web-based games. During the time of “Neo Pets”, we also designed console games, board games, and collectible card games.

We enjoy creating entertainment activities that make us feel good, which is why our games are family-friendly, fair, and not profit-driven.

We are collaborating with a studio composed of many former Meteor Games employees to develop Dragginz. Their addition brings a wealth of expertise, with backgrounds ranging from developing the real-time strategy game Syndicate at Bullfrog Productions to creating mobile games such as Monopoly Go! and Scrabble Go!

All members of the team are avid gamers, and some of our favorite games include “Dungeon Keeper,” “Camelot’s Dark Age,” “World of Warcraft,” “Slime Rancher,” “The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time,” and “Gravekeeper.” I believe you will see the shadows of these games in Dragginz.

The number of players for “Neopets” reached 140 million in the early 2000s, what an astonishing number. Can you tell us about your journey in developing and managing “Neopets”?

Adam and I co-founded Neopets in 1999. Initially, we both served as developers, database engineers, game designers, writers, artists, graphic designers, and community managers until we raised funds to expand the team. When we scaled up, Adam began to focus on development while I concentrated on design, but we always collaborated on the creative direction.

As you can imagine, in 1999, there were no cloud services, so we had to purchase, install, and manage servers ourselves. We encountered many hard technical limitations in the early development of “Neo Pets.” Scalability was a complete nightmare, with frequent downtimes and data losses. Whenever there was a failure, we had to drive to the data center to fix it. In contrast, I am very glad that we now have the Internet Computer, which is fully scalable, does not require data centers, and doesn’t even need cloud services. Every component of the game can exist on the blockchain.

However, the rapid growth of “Neo Pets” has surprised us. I believe the reason for our success is that we update the game content every day. We set puzzles for players to solve, and sometimes they are very complex, requiring players to compile the code hidden in the HTML pages to find the answers!

As the popularity of “Nio Pets” has grown, the pressure to generate revenue has also increased. There was a time when most of our employees were dedicated to seeking sponsorships for the game, making it difficult to update the game content. This is one of the reasons why Adam and I strongly opposed placing profits above game content. At that time, it was really stressful for us because we were basically fighting with management for more resources to develop the core content of the game!

Anyway, “Neo Pets” is not all bad, the community is great. We have learned a lot and plan to keep pushing on Dragginz.

I heard that the inspiration for developing Dragginz came from Neopets?

Dragginz was actually our initial idea for “Neo Pets,” but it became different after we actually built “Neo Pets.” We also tried to make this idea a reality again at Meteor Games, but it still didn’t happen. This is our third attempt to create our dream game, which we considered building in Web3 back in 2014.

Please provide us with a detailed introduction to the gameplay of Dragginz.

Dragginz is a free MMO game where everyone enters the game world with a dragon egg. You can craft items to hatch and evolve your pets, and then adventure in the vast game world, or just trade.

The goal of Dragginz is to provide players with a variety of gameplay options. Depending on your interests, you may become the owner of the strongest Dragginz, the most powerful spells, the most delicious recipes, and more. This is a virtual world, and we hope to create a sense of independent participation for every player, rather than just following a standard leveling path.

In the Reddit section of “Neopets”, many veteran players are skeptical of Dragginz because it includes NFT elements. What is your opinion on this matter?

Many people outside the crypto industry think NFTs are just pictures, more specifically, they are associated with fraud. However, in Dragginz, NFTs are different.

Let me give a few examples.

In the UK, there is an old-fashioned party game called Beetle Drive, where players take turns rolling dice and drawing the body parts of a beetle.

In our game, each pet is like a Beetle Drive, and each part is an NFT. You must pay two Flow(Dragginz of mana) to roll the dice once, rolling once per hour to draw parts. If you collect all parts of the pet, you will unlock and be able to use that pet.

Players can sell NFTs of certain parts, or they can sell partially completed pets as NFTs. This is valuable to other players because it requires time and luck to draw parts. Essentially, this is a way to pay for shortcuts.

Here’s another example. In Dragginz, you can create spells with multiple uses. Ordinary players can conjure a floating cloud that waters all plants for a week. If you’re really not interested in daily garden care but still want to harvest the special materials needed for cooking, processing, and so on, then this might be the ideal choice.

If players truly focus on spell crafting, they might be able to create a floating cloud that lasts for a month. It can then be converted into an NFT and sold to other players in need.

Another spell that players can cast is the Mana Battery. Players need to create Flow and then fill it with more Flow. These charged Mana Batteries can be sold as NFTs to other players in need.

The list of possibilities for NFT use cases in Dragginz has been continually expanding…

One thing you may notice is that, in these examples, we as developers do not directly benefit from the sales of NFTs. Only those who invest time and energy into creating the NFTs can gain profits from the sales. Our purpose in designing Dragginz is not to make quick money from NFT sales. On the contrary, we see that if the community wants to leverage NFTs, they can absolutely become a part of a thriving game economy.

Tokenomics and Development Status of Dragginz

In May 2021, the Internet Computer mainnet was officially launched, and the native token ICP reached an extraordinarily high price, enjoying a period of glory. Although the token price was later manipulated and fell sharply, the creators, the DFINITY Foundation, did not choose to rug pull but continued to develop according to the roadmap.

SNS(Service Nervous System) is an important step on the roadmap, where all ecological dApps can launch decentralized token sales on SNS, transitioning to a fully decentralized DAO governance model. The SNS-1 token is an experiment prior to the official launch of SNS, and all ICP holders can participate in the exchange, 1 SNS-