Remember back in the early aughts when everyone was playing Neopets in the early days of online gaming? Well, the people who continued to make and work on the game remember, and they’re hoping to bring everyone back into the Neopets fold thanks to a buyout they just conducted for the game from the Chinese company, NetDragon, that owned it. World of Neopia, which is led by Neopets executive Dominic Law, is the new company that has saved the game that many of us probably thought was already dead.

Neopets, after decades of skating by on name alone and operating at a loss for the last 10 years or so, was in the process of creating an NFT aspect of the game that Law was overseeing. However, last month NetDragon shut down JumpStart, the subsidiary that ran NeoPets. The development team behind the game didn’t want it to end, though, and so they negotiated a buyout deal to take Neopets independent and launch World of Neopia. This means that the corporate overlords of the game are gone and Neopets can… go back to being a thing still? The team has been staffing up for this new page in history too and already begun addressing long-time user concerns.

“Free from the corporate baggage that existed in the past, the newly united TNT (The Neopets Team) has now been entrusted with the decision-making and overall brand strategy of Neopets, enabling them to work solely on the betterment of the entire Neopets game and community,” they explained in a lengthy statement released today.

What that means specifically, is that Neopets NFTs are gone, despite Law being the man who was in charge of that project under NetDragon. The team is immediately moving away from the concept to instead focus on a mobile game called World of Neopets, which will be “a social life-simulation game in which you live your ideal Neopian life from the perspective of a Neopet.” That sure sounds like a thing.

If you happen to have bought a Neopets Metaverse NFT, don’t worry, as it will still function as an NFT and World of Neopia promises to continue to support them, though that just seems to mean having a Discord channel open. For those of you champing at the bit to finally get back into Neopets, a new website will launch on July 20 with more details and a roadmap for the future of what is a surprisingly still-existing game.