Modernizing 25 Years of Neopets

How we navigated technical debt, the death of Flash, and the triage required to save a digital legend.

Hello peeps! Today I’ll be talking about how my team and I have tackled a big challenge on Neopets, modernizing the site! I’ll talk a bit about how we prioritize and triage work for the Neopets website and what we’ve done to bring content back!

Introduction: The Existential Crisis

On December 31, 2020, Adobe Flash officially retired. For most of the internet, it was the end of an era. But for Neopets, it was an existential threat. Over 1,000+ mini-games and site pages were suddenly inaccessible. This was before my time but when I went from Lead Game Designer to Producer in 2024, I took on the challenge my predecessors had to continue modernizing the site. The challenge wasn't just "fixing a site," it was a high-stakes technical triage to keep a 25 year old legacy alive while still doing seasonal events and other initiatives. 

Triage: The Impact vs. Effort Framework

There are a few different ways of going about this, such as the Eisenhower Matrix, or ABCDE Method and more. Looking at the Impact vs Effort Matrix, it allows you to look at initiatives through two key factors: impact and effort. Each quadrant shows areas for high/low impact and high/low effort, making it easier to identify high value and low effort opportunities to get small wins. Along with prioritizing/deprioritizing tasks that drain resources that don’t have a lot of value. You can learn more about this in Product School’s article, ‘Impact Effort Matrix & How to Use One + Examples.’

You cannot pay off 25 years of technical debt in a single quarter, this was going to be a long game. My first priority was moving the team from "reactive firefighting" to "strategic planning."

To do this, I implemented an Impact vs. Effort Matrix. We looked at every feature and planned quarterly meetings through two lenses:

• Quantitative Data: Page visits, revenue generation, and Premium subscriber engagement.

• Qualitative Value: Community nostalgia and "brand soul," those features that make Neopets feel like home.

By categorizing tasks into this matrix, we identified "Quick Wins" (High Impact/Low Effort) that restored community trust immediately, while deprioritizing "Resource Sinks" that didn't move the needle and didn't have a substantial amount of value (Low Impact, High Effort). They aren’t completely going away though, we’ll have these in a backlog for when we have more bandwidth or an initiative that prioritizes it.

The Ruffle Integration: A "Bridge" Strategy

One of our biggest hurdles was the Games Room. Initially, we spent a significant amount of time rebuilding individual games in HTML5 some examples being with the Faerie Bubbles game. We quickly realized this wasn't scalable, rebuilding 500+ games manually would take years and is costly.

We shifted from a "Rebuild" strategy to an "Emulation" strategy, which actually was a suggestion from the community since they had been utilizing an emulator browser extension to be able to access Flash games on site. By partnering with Ruffle, we integrated a Flash emulator directly into the site. This allowed us to:

• Restore 100+ games (more to come!)

• Save thousands of development hours

• Redirect those saved resources toward The Void Within plot and other updates/revamps (Dailies, Seasonal Events, Inventory, Nostalgic Pets [otherwise known as UC Pets], a NEW Neopet, NC Mall, Trading Post and more!)

Fun Fact: One of the first things I worked on when I joined Neopets in 2021 was revamping the NC Mall! Maybe I'll do an article on it sometime...👀

This "Bridge" strategy is a perfect example of Resource Optimization: using a technical shortcut to provide immediate value so we can spend our time working on other page conversions and updates.

Page Conversions: HTML5 and mobile friendly

Modernizing the UI/UX wasn't just about aesthetics, it was about mobile accessibility. However, converting thousands of legacy pages is a daunting backlog.

My approach was Contextual Modernization. Instead of converting pages at random, we tied them to ongoing seasonal and special events. For our latest plot, The Void Within, we identified which legacy pages the story would touch and "piggybacked" their conversion onto the event's development. This allowed us to modernize the site while delivering fresh, playable content simultaneously.

We have used this strategy to update seasonal events as well, converting pages related to the events and update related prize pools. For example, in the latest 2025 Winter Starlight Celebration event (our winter event), we did page conversions for activities or ‘Dailies’ that were winter themed and updated their prize pools which hadn’t been updated in over 10 years! We also took the chance to add avatars, which would be long term goals players can work towards. 

From Firefighting to Agile Sprints

Behind the scenes, we had to modernize the processes of how we build. We transitioned from a "Waterfall" model, where the whole team moved as one group one initiative at a time to Agile Feature Teams.

• Dedicated Feature teams or ‘Pods’: Smaller, cross-functional teams now own specific features or events.

• The 20% Rule: We allocate a percentage of every sprint specifically for technical debt and bug fixing, ensuring we never stop cleaning the code as we build the future.

The Foundation for the Next 25 Years

Today, Neopets is no longer just "surviving" the post-Flash era, it’s thriving and we’re tackling more page conversions and updates every quarter. By clearing technical debt and prioritizing with intent, we’ve been able to launch the first major site plot in over six years, The Void Within.

Modernizing a legend is a marathon, not a sprint. It requires a balance of data-driven logic and a deep respect for the community that kept the lights on for 25+ years.

We have so much more planned and we can’t wait to show the community! I hope you enjoyed this topic, thanks for reading!