ICQ and Neopets: The Early Internet Beyond AIM and GeoCities
Before AOL Instant Messenger became the default, a strange little "uh-oh" sound announced the arrival of ICQ — and while it faded, a virtual pet website quietly built one of the internet's first genuine economies.
The story of the early internet’s social side usually gets told through AOL Instant Messenger and GeoCities, the two platforms that loom largest in collective memory. But before AIM dominated, and alongside GeoCities’ sprawl of personal homepages, two other services — one an instant messenger, one a virtual pet website — carved out their own distinct, devoted followings that deserve remembering on their own terms.
ICQ: The “Uh-Oh” That Came Before “You’ve Got Mail”
ICQ (“I Seek You”) launched in 1996, developed by the Israeli company Mirabilis, and was genuinely one of the first mainstream instant messaging services, predating AOL Instant Messenger’s own 1997 launch. ICQ introduced a number of features that would later become standard across instant messaging generally — a persistent buddy list showing who was online, the ability to see when someone was typing, and its own instantly recognisable notification sound, a distinctive “uh-oh” alert tone that, for the people who used it, is as immediately evocative of the era as AIM’s door-creak-and-slam sound became for a slightly later generation.
ICQ used a unique numerical identifier (an “ICQ number”) rather than a chosen username as its core identity system, a genuinely distinctive design choice that made lower-digit, earlier-registered numbers something of a status symbol among heavy users, not unlike short, early social media handles becoming collector’s items decades later. AOL acquired ICQ in 1998, and while the service continued operating for years afterward, it gradually lost ground to AIM in the US market specifically, even as it retained a strong and devoted user base in parts of Europe and the former Soviet Union well into the 2000s.
Neopets: A Virtual Pet Website That Became a Genuine Economy
Neopets launched in 1999, created by Adam Powell and Donna Williams, initially as a fairly simple virtual pet website — adopt a Neopet, feed and care for it, decorate its profile page — but it grew into something considerably more elaborate: an entire virtual economy built around Neopoints, the site’s in-game currency, earned through playing a large library of simple browser games and spent on pet food, clothing, and items in an active player-to-player marketplace.
What made Neopets genuinely distinctive, beyond the pet-care premise itself, was how seriously the site’s community took its internal economy — dedicated communities formed around trading strategy, rare item collecting, and even discussions bordering on genuine economic analysis of Neopoints inflation and item scarcity, a level of engaged, structured community activity that few other websites aimed at a young audience managed to sustain for as long as Neopets did. The site also incorporated a genuinely large amount of user-generated content and storytelling, with an ongoing site-wide narrative delivered through the “Neopian Times” and regular plot events that active users followed closely.
Two Different Flavours of Early Internet Devotion
ICQ and Neopets represent two quite different strands of what made the early internet compelling before broadband and smartphones made constant connectivity the unremarkable default: ICQ tapped into the novel thrill of real-time, text-based conversation with people who might be anywhere, while Neopets built a genuinely persistent, ongoing virtual world that rewarded regular return visits and sustained engagement in a way that felt closer to an early precursor of the “live service” model that would later define much of gaming.
Why They’re Remembered Differently
Both services have a smaller, more devoted nostalgic following today compared to AIM or GeoCities’ broader cultural footprint, but for the people who were genuinely invested in either — an ICQ number memorised the way a phone number once was, or a carefully maintained Neopets account with a garden of rare pets and items — the specific, detailed memory of exactly how each platform worked tends to run unusually deep, the kind of nostalgia that comes from sustained, repeated engagement rather than a single memorable cultural moment.