As a woman who talks about video games on television, radio and elsewhere for a living, I’m often asked how I got into games, and I reply – truthfully – that I have been playing them my whole life. I was fortunate enough to grow up in a family that owned every major game console. But when I reached adolescence, something (besides the obvious) changed. My varied video game diet narrowed dramatically. I skipped the entire console generation that included the PlayStation 2, GameCube, and Xbox in favour of my bedroom PC and two worlds it allowed me to access: The Sims and Neopets.

The Neopets website was launched in 1999, and I’m pretty sure I was introduced to it by my uncle, though it’s known for its popularity among girls. It fits with the idea of femininity as nurturing: a virtual world that allows you to care for cute pets, play games to earn a currency called Neopoints, shop for clothes for your pets, build and furnish houses, and chat on the forums.

In 2005, by which time I had stopped playing, Neopets was sold for $160m to Viacom, which changed the advertising and introduced Neocash, a new form of currency that can be bought only with real money. Interestingly, as explained by YouTube series People Make Games, it was also once owned by Scientologists. In 2014, Viacom sold the site to edutainment company Knowledge Adventure, which is owned by Chinese publisher NetDragon. This month sees the release of a mobile puzzle game called Neopets Legends & Letters – but, later this year, it will release an app that promises to contain all of Neopia.

The original Neopets website still exists, and this 20-year-old online world is a strange relic. In some ways it has moved with the times: there’s an active Reddit community and a fairly popular Twitter account. But revisiting the website after so many years was a gut punch for me. In so many ways it looks exactly the same: the same banner with the same logo, the same pets with the same visual design, the same mini-games. The familiar graphics tugged me straight back to my adolescence, which was incredibly uncomfortable because that was not a good time for me.

Neopets fitted perfectly into my young life. It appeared when I was changing schools, trying and failing to make friends, exploring interests that baffled the people around me. I found purpose in earning Neopoints and collecting avatars. Like the protagonist in Nina Freeman’s semi-autobiographical game Lost Memories Dot Net, I learned basic HTML so that I could customise my user page. I worried the adults in my life by befriending people I met on the forums. I discovered aspects of internet culture that remain today: fan art, wikis, trolls. I buried myself in Neopets when I barely belonged anywhere else. Then I got older, and when I didn’t need it any more I let it go.

A lot of millennial women with fond memories of Neopets are excited about this forthcoming mobile app that will let them visit Neopia on the go. Perhaps some of them have continued to care for their pets for the last two decades. But, for me, Neopets is inextricably linked to a period in my own life and in the history of the internet. I don’t want want to see it modernised with in-app purchases and push notifications. Nor, selfishly, do I want to see a resurgence in popularity for something that immediately transports me back to a time I’d rather forget.