#100. Scorchy Slots and a Piano Exam (Thursday, January 17, 2002)

What was your best day…of finally being done with something, and having the rest of the day to do whatever you wanted?

Back when I was in sixth grade, I was introduced to a new website. It had been around for about two years, but had already reached an unprecedented level of popularity.

It was called Neopets. These days it’s kicking around, but after the original creators sold it off to Viacom in 2005 and after countless acquisitions since, it’s become a shell of its former self. But at the time, when the interactive web was still in its infancy, Neopets was the greatest. It was one of the first virtual pet sites, where you could adopt pets, feed them, equip them for battle, and even paint them different colors like Purple, Electric, or Pirate (with paintbrushes that cost an insane amount of digital currency, or “NeoPoints”).

And that digital currency was what really made Neopets special. You could earn these NeoPoints by playing fun flash games, and then spend them to buy items you needed at the site-owned shops. Thing was, as the site grew, a whole secondary market developed around these items; an astute user (with a fast internet connection) could buy a rare item at one of the site-owned shops for far below market price, then resell them in their own shop at a 2000% markup¹. That was just one thing, though: there were hundreds of other pieces of the site – “quests” where you give some mystical creature some item in exchange for some potentially rare item, gambling games, daily random events/puzzles, and even periodic “plots” in the world of Neopia – which users could dig into for hours on end. Neopets was a full-blown online society.

In the winter of 2002, when Neopets was close to its peak, I was spending pretty much all of my non-school/non-homework hours on that site.

There was one game in particular that fueled my addiction. It was called Scorchy Slots. Basically, a slot machine game—but this was before fancy Flash animations, so you just refreshed your browser over and over (at a cost of 5 NeoPoints apiece) and each time a bunch of fruits, money bags, faeries, and scrolls would show up on screen. And if three or four of the same showed up in a row, you’d win a prize (a huge prize if it was four). A silly game with almost no skill involved, but man was it addicting.²

Which posed a bit of a problem for me at the time, because I had my Level 4 Piano Exam coming up—and unlike school exams, people do fail those. Often. But somehow, in the ten days preceding the exam, my parents got me to get my shit together and practice hard. In other words: no Neopets. That was the first time I recall being so intensely focused on one thing for an extended period of time; and looking back, it was actually pretty fun.

So on the Thursday of my exam, I felt ready. I had left school at lunchtime that day; but the exam was at three, so I had a few hours to kill. And instead of suggesting any last-minute practice, my mom told me I could go upstairs and play my Neopets. And that one hour of playing Scorchy Slots? It. Felt. Good.

Of course, I then did my Piano Exam, passed it adequately with a 71 (60 was the passing score), then went home and spent the rest of the night playing Scorchy Slots in post-exam bliss.

(Until four hours later, when my pet became bored of playing Scorchy Slots, at which point I went downstairs and watched the newest episode of George Shrinks—also the greatest, by the way.)

A practice that was commonly known as “restocking”. I wasn’t as aware of it back then, but ten years later during Spring Break (long after the Neopets peak), I got on a nostalgia kick and did the “restocking” thing for the whole break. Made more that week than I did in my entire playing career before combined.
The big one I was gunning for was the Treasure Map pieces, which were worth a hefty amount on the secondary market.