Altador Cup "goal poses" (partially lost images of Neopets characters; 2006-2024)
A screenshot of Mirsha Grelinek scoring a goal against Fanetti in the Altador Cup II.
Status: Partially Lost
The '"Altador Cup goal poses'" is the informal nickname given to a set of images that would appear when the player makes a goal in the Yooyuball web browser game on the virtual world website Neopets.
Notably exclusive to these images are the Jelly World Practice Team, a set of characters that since 2008, consisted entirely of Jelly Chias. However, an earlier set of characters otherwise exclusive to these images consisting of Jelly colored versions of five different Neopet species existed. In 2006, they would consist of a Kougra and a Kau, and would be updated to include the rest of the roster in 2007 to depict a Blumaroo, an Usul, and a Techo.
Image Guide
History
On June 1st, 2006, the Altador Cup event was announced to take place, coinciding with the then upcoming 2006 FIFA World Cup. Signups began on June 3rd, 2006 and would allow players to play the game of Yooyuball to practice for the upcoming season. Whenever the player scored a goal, one of the teammates would always appear to represent a team when scoring, and these images were stored locally within the Yooyuball's files.
While the Altador Cup was intended to coincide with each real life FIFA World Cup event and take plave every 4 years, it's popularity led to it becoming an annual event beginning with it's return in 2007Cite error: Closing </ref> missing for <ref> tag, the teamscorer.swf file would be updated to replace Maital Koric with Vela Binal, who was removed due to being injured in-universe.[1].
In 2008, the .swf file for Yooyuball would be drastically updated for a variety of changes to improve immersion and user experience, and would now recall the teamscorer.swf file from a different directory, https://images.neopets.com/games/altador_yooyu/2008/teamscorer.swf This was presumably done to keep the original teamscorer.swf file intact at the time.
In preparation for the fifth Altador Cup event in 2010, the game was updated to accomodate 18 competing teams with the introduction of Team Moltara. the original teamscorer.swf was overwritten with a work-in-progress version of the new roster, which remains in this state to this day. It is possible that it was overwritten at an earlier date, but this was never documented to be the case. Regardless, a finalized version of teamscorer.swf would be published to the directory https://images.neopets.com/games/altador_yooyu/2010/teamscorer.swf
In 2011, the Yooyuball game would begin being significantly reworked internally with prototyping starting in March 2011.[2] Starting with this version, the goal poses would be stored alongside player sprites in a new directory, https://images.neopets.com/games/g1288/altador.swf with each file being named by each competing team. The goalkeeper image would also be stored in these files instead of the base game going forward. When team rosters were updated, the accompanying team .swf file would be updated to reflect this, replacing the original file, in contrast to the 2008 and 2010 team roster revisions being stored in their own directories on Neopets' image servers.
In 2021, the Altador Cup and its games, including Yooyuball, would be remade from it's original format of Adobe Flash to HTML5, to coincide with the discontinuation of Adobe Flash Player on December 31st, 2020. Images are now stored as .png files on Neopets image servers, and return to having separate variations that do not overwrite the originals. All of these files are indexed and can be viewed on Jellyneo's Dr. Sloth's Image Emporium.
Documentation
Users taking screenshots of their goals was a decently uncommon practice, with many users choosing to share their screenshots on image hosting services such as Photobucket and Tinypic via Neopets fan forums such as the Neopian Times Writers Forum, The Daily Neopets, and the Pink Poogle Toy Forum. The preservation of these images have deteriorated over the years with users either not paying for Photobucket subscriptions, or the closure of Tinypic on September 9th, 2019; with archived copies on places such as the Wayback Machine being sparse.
Additionally, there were a small number of people who had blogs on services such as Blogger who had shared their gameplay screenshots of Yooyuball, including goals that they've made.
As YouTube had begun to rise in popularity significantly by 2007, a notable amount of Neopets users had decided to record their gameplay and upload it to YouTube, which would invariably preserve some of the goal poses used at the time.
During the 2007 Altador Cup, the petpage "Man_eater_pikachu" would be shared on websites such as the Neopian Times Writers Forum and would contain screenshots of the Jelly Kougra and Jelly Kau, and in 2007 would be updated to include screenshots of the then newly added Jelly Blumaroo, Techo, and Usul members. Some time later, the owner of the pet page's account (pokemon_lunatic) was frozen, reverting the page to the default Kougra pet page template. This page would be used as a reference for the NeoDex Neopets Wiki hosted by Pink Poogle Toy on July 7th, 2007 by the user DreamingLady.[3]
On September 2nd, 2008, a user with an unlogged IP Address would edit the Jelly World page on the NeoDex Neopets Wiki by Pink Poogle Toy to add back the Jelly Kau's position as a forward and add that the Jelly Usul was a right forward.[4] Two days later on September 4th, 2008, another unlogged IP address would add that the Blumaroo and Techo were the right and left defenders respectively.[5] It is worth noting that by this time, the Jelly Chias had already replaced the original teammates, making the primary source of this information unavailable and was likely a fan's recollection or was sourced elsewhere.
The Jelly World Practice Team would later be documented on another Neopets fansite, Jellyneo in it's subsection dedicated to documenting lore and characters, The Book of Ages as "Practice Team". This page would repeat the information available about the Practice Team on NeoDex, including the positions of the removed members, but also included images of two of the members; the Kougra, which was sourced from a .swf file of the old Yooyuball minigame, and the Kau, of which's source is currently unknown but was likely a screenshot from a petpage.
Search
On September 6th, 2020, ProblematicPeriwinklePlum would email Jellyneo asking if they had the other missing teammate images, to which they responded that only waht was shown on the page was what they had. ProblematicPeriwinklePlum would later track down an image of the Jelly Blumaroo from a now privated YouTube video featuring a user losing a goal to the Practice Team the same day.
Additionally, ProblematicPeriwinklePlum had rediscovered the Man_eater_pikachu petpage link on NeoDex. It was later suggested by Jellyneo to contact pokemon_lunatic for the original images, who was still active on the Neopian Times Writers' Forum under the username Dimi in an email reply, of which ProblematicPeriwinklePlum had done. One hour later, Dimi would respond explaining that their original account was frozen and was unable to recover it, and the original images would be on an old laptop that they no longer had access to as it was in a different country, and that they were doubtful the original images still existed on said laptop.
On August 1st, 2024, ProblematicPeriwinklePlum would find that a YouTube video by Yooyuball - How to score was uploaded by the user Miłosz, which featured a screenshot of "Dirty" Navers scoring a goal against Mungo Lifler (who was mistakenly present at the time and intended to be replaced by Reshar Collifey).
That same day, the Neopets LIVE -Altador Cup Edition took place, with TNT Luna being present on the r/neopets Discord server. After the AMA session concluded, ProblematicPeriwinklePlum pinged TNT Luna to ask about the whereabouts of the original Jelly World Practice Team images as a direct message over the official Neopets Instagram account, and stated that she would pass the message along. A few hours later, the official Neopets Instagram account would reply to ProblematicPeriwinklePlum's direct message, stating:
Hi there! Thanks so much for messaging us about this. Finding lost artwork to preserve the Neopets brand is something that is important to us! We will be sure to flag this request to the art team, although can’t make any promises due to their own workload and the existing backlog of things that need to be done around the site. However once again thanks for supporting the Neopets LIVE! and being a fan of the site!
On August 14th, 2024, Reddit user u/SharpenedGemma commented that they had found the image of Jelly Techo on a blogger website, being the Me and My Neopets blog, where the owner of the blog had screenshot all of their goals, including a goal with Turo Rafels and a loss to the Jelly Techo, thereby preserving it.
On August 15th, 2024, Flashpoint Archive contributor Ganonthefreat privately messaged ProblematicPerwinklePlum via Discord that they had found the .swf for the 2006 version of Yooyuball, which featured otherwise missing or low quality images of Xila Kitae, as well as earlier variations of goal poses for other characters such as "Dasher" Soley and Meela Kitah.[6]
On August 19th, 2024, ProblematicPeriwinklePlum emailed Max van Doorn (aka Van Doodle) to ask about if he had recalled seeing any of the missing goal poses for the Altador Cup, as he was involved with the HTML5 Altador Cup revamp. The following day on August 20th, Max replied to the email stating that he did not recall seeing the images that were being searched for, and "vaguely recalled some gaps". Max van Doorn told that the TNT members Weirdough and Clammyhand would have access to the art archives for Neopets. While emails would be sent to inquire about them, neither person would yield any response.
At present, a total of 7 characters have their goal poses completely missing (Elbin Towse, Filo Desenz, Helmo Timm, Jelly Usul, Maital Koric, Moni Vyshan, and Selwick Phoss), all of which being present exclusively in the 2007 versions of teamscorer.swf.
Gallery
Goal poses
The Jelly Kougra goalie, whose image was found in the original Yooyuball game .swf file
The Jelly Kau forward, whose image was reposted on The Book of Ages, though it's source is unknown.
The Jelly Blumaroo defender, whose image was found in a YouTube video.
The Jelly Techo defender, whose image was found on the Me and my Neopets Blog.
Turo Rafels' goal pose, which was found on the Me and my Neopets Blog.
"Dirty" Navers' goal pose, which was found in a YouTube video.
Search
Email correspondence between ProblematicPeriwinklePlum and Jellyneo from September 2020. (1/3)
Email correspondence between ProblematicPeriwinklePlum and Jellyneo from September 2020. (2/3)
Email correspondence between ProblematicPeriwinklePlum and Jellyneo from September 2020. (3/3)
Dimi's response to finding the original Jelly World Practice Team's image whereabouts on the Neopian Times Writers' Forum.
Original message by ProblematicPeriwinklePlum aeking about the original Jelly World Practice Team images whereabouts.
TNT Luna's response about the whereabouts of the missing original Jelly World Practice Team images.
ProblematicPeriwinklePlum's original Instagram message to the Neopets Instagram account about the Jelly World Practice Team.
The Neopets Instagram account's response via direct messages about the search for the missing images.
Email correspondence between ProblematicPeriwinklePlum and Max van Doorn regarding the Altador Cup goal poses.
See Also
- Neopets (lost production material from cancelled animated television series; 2020)
- Neopets Mobile (found features of discontinued T-Mobile service; 2006-2009)
- Neopets Movie (partially found production material for unproduced CGI animated film; 2006)
- Neopets: The Darkest Faerie (lost build of unreleased original PlayStation version of PlayStation 2 action-adventure game; 2003)
- PetPet Park (lost online MMO game based on Neopets; 2008-2014)
- Tales of Neopia (unreleased MMO game based on Neopets; 2008-2010)
- The Last Smiley (found online Neopets platform game; 2004-2006)
References
- ↑ ディフェンダー負傷 ~ グレースのネオペット日記
- ↑ snarkie's Flickr; March 24th, 2011
- ↑ July 7th, 2007 revision on the Jelly World page on NeoDex
- ↑ September 2nd, 2008 revision on the Jelly World page on NeoDex
- ↑ September 4th, 2008 revision on the Jelly World page on NeoDex
- ↑ u/problematicperiwinkleplum's post to r/neopets in August 15th, 2024