Virtual Pets
I've been part of the virtual-pet web for over a decade — running IcePets and building the infrastructure the smaller games in the scene needed.
What the virtual-pet web is
If you weren't online for it, here's the short version. The OG is Neopets — the massive late-90s/early-2000s virtual-pet site that became the cultural reference point for the whole category. You adopted pets, took care of them, explored game worlds, played minigames, traded with other players. A handful of other big players sat alongside it (Subeta, Marapets, Flight Rising) and a long tail of smaller virtual-pet sites built tight communities around the same loop.
The big players slowly faded; the long tail of smaller sites and the people who run them kept it going. That long tail is the scene I've been part of for over a decade.
IcePets, and the ecosystem around it
The centre of what I do in the scene is IcePets — a virtual-pet game I've been running for over a decade. I didn't build it from scratch. I came in originally as a contractor when the previous owners were struggling to keep it going. The community was strong, the players had been there for years, and the game was worth saving — so eventually I bought it. It's been mine ever since, and it's the main thing I do in the scene.
But IcePets isn't the only thing. The bigger virtual-pet players (Neopets, Subeta in its day) had their own discovery, their own communities, their own art programs. When those faded, the smaller sites had no equivalent — players couldn't find each other's games, the art got lost when sites closed, no proper discovery layer existed. So I started building the missing infrastructure myself, site by site.
The original vision was bigger than what shipped: a community of sites that worked together — sharing data, cross-referring traffic, talking to each other under the hood. I built some of that architecture but never fully finished wiring it together. What did ship still stands on its own.
IcePets
CoreThe virtual-pet game I've owned and run for over a decade. A tight community of players who've been there for years.
Mistic.pet
HistoricalOne of the older virtual-pet sites and one of the very first I ever worked on. Where I met some of the longest-running collaborators I still work with today.
The Gaming List
DiscoveryA forum and resource for virtual-pet site owners and aspiring owners to understand the challenges they face when building a site.
Online Gaming Directory
DiscoveryAn awareness and matching platform for online games — sites can incentivize their players to discover others. Wider than just virtual pets, but virtual-pet sites are a meaningful slice of the audience.
GameSiteArt
PreservationWhen a virtual-pet site shuts down and the owner stops paying the hosting bill, the original art usually dies with it. GameSiteArt is my attempt to keep that art alive after the sites that commissioned it are gone.
Why I built it this way
When I bought IcePets the reason was simple: the community was strong and I liked being part of it. The bigger ecosystem play around it came later, out of the same instinct — when a small scene loses its giants, the choice is to let the long tail die quietly or to build the missing infrastructure so it doesn't have to. I picked the second one, even when the bigger vision turned out to be more than one person could finish on the side.
The honest version of running something for this long: the work ebbs and flows. There are stretches where I'm shipping new features and stretches where IcePets and the rest are running on maintenance while my attention is elsewhere. That's the rhythm of keeping a small thing alive for over a decade by yourself — it's not a constant push, it's a long, uneven commitment to keeping a thing alive that other people still care about.
How this connects to the rest of my work
A lot of what I know about building software that has to keep running for a real audience — moderation, performance under traffic spikes, payment flows, fraud handling, support — I learned from these sites, not from client work. The patterns transfer directly. If you've read the testimonials on the homepage, the developers who mention coming up through IcePets are talking about this scene.