Waddle on - the rise and fall of Club Penguin

The browser game that was the childhood of millions: chances are that if you ask an MYP, or a DP student, they will know what Club Penguin was. The game was an online hub where players would walk around the island and interact with others, play games, decorate their igloos, and just be part of a community of fellow flightless birds. The Disney game had over 330 million user accounts created in over 190 countries. Let’s dwell on the origin, the growth, the decline, and the lousy spin-off (*coughs* Club Penguin Island…).

Inspired by other browser games created partly by the same people as the creators of CP such (as Penguin Chat and Experimental Penguins), the game was released into the world on the 24th of October of 2005 as a MMO game (MMO stands for “massively multiplayer online”) and it gained people’s attention early on – by March of 2006, the game already had over a million players. The game was sold to Disney in 2007, along with the company who controlled it.

Back then, the game was very different from the Club Penguin we knew from the 2010s. Fewer locations, fewer games, and this very old-fashioned look we could still see later on in older, forgotten rooms.

Figure 1 and 2: The map of Club Penguin in 2006, and the boiler room.

Figure 3: The bigger, more scattered out map of Club Penguin, near its shutdown.

From there on, the game’s player base would grow immensely, and the game grew with it. Events, a bunch of new characters, and an expansion of the map and player experience changed the game forever, and not necessarily for the worse. I personally used to enjoy a nice afternoon of Club Penguin in my old school computer on the early 2010s. Good times.

Disney, as well as the original creators of the game, had the mission to ensure children were safe in the Club Penguin environment. The game was made for people from 6 to 14 years old, although there was no restriction for other people to join the game. Remember features like the “Ultimate Safe Chat”, where you’d have no more than a selection of pre-written sentences to write? Or the strict moderation that would block hundreds of different words and variations of it, or an automatic block of personal info such as phone numbers and e-mails? My favourite thing was the inclusion of the community in the quest for child safety, by joining the “Elite Penguin Force” and making sure penguins would behave correctly around the island.

But such a thing wouldn’t make the game any less fun. We even had the right to our own igloo, the place where we’d invite our closer friends, keep our puffles and decorate for fun occasions such as Halloween, or the Music Jam parties that were celebrated in Club Penguin! I still have a couple of songs stuck in my head. Anyone remembers “Party in my Iggy”? Just me?

Club Penguin’s positive influence went beyond the game itself. A nice example would be the “Coins for Change” movement where every year, players would give away their coins for real life charity causes. And these weren’t small values – we’re talking about one, two million dollars raised for charity. I’m just scratching the surface of an exhaustive list of activities you can do on the game.

Later on, though, some things such as clothes would begin to feel harder to access as memberships (they have been around for quite a while, but its advantages were becoming very extensive) put some of these features behind a paywall, which in a way, was understandable. However, the slow decline in popularity later from 2015 on might have made Club Penguin unsustainable to maintain (or just not lucrative) and Disney announced the game would be shut down permanently on the 30th of March of 2017. What about advertising? Well, remember Disney was very protective of their young player base. Adverts could easily lead children to unsafe websites, so Disney opted to put no advertising on the Club Penguin website – so the revenue was pretty much limited to merchandising and membership fees. I hear this quote a lot of times; “You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain.” I think we can all agree Club Penguin was the former.

And so, it shut down, but not without a few special moments. Remember the whole Iceberg myth? Where you and a few other penguins could turn the Iceberg around? Near the end, Club Penguin would let players be able to turn the iceberg into a cool disco party with a heartfelt message in a golden placard. All players also received a free membership in the very last day of Club Penguin.

Figure 4: A myth becomes reality - the tipping of the iceberg.

Figure 5: "Waddle on" - the message you'd get every time you log off, and here, on the other side of the iceberg.

It feels sad for such a beloved game to be shut down. Disney offered a new game, however – Club Penguin Island, a game that…was shut down a year after. It was definitely not even near of what Club Penguin had to offer.

But Club Penguin was still “around”. Although many might have been unaware, there were Club Penguin Private Servers (or CPPS) – versions of Club Penguin ran by people who were not affiliated with Club Penguin. A major scandal has happened just last year, and most were shut down after Disney filed a copyright claim - over some very shady information by a BBC investigation that found out evidence of racist, anti-Semitic and explicit content on the biggest CPPS available – Club Penguin Online. Citing BBC during their investigation, they have found.

· content filters designed to remove offensive language had been disabled on several servers, allowing swear words, homophobic slurs, anti-Semitism and racist messages to be posted publicly;

· moderators were no longer removing racist content. One player invited the BBC to their igloo, which was decorated to spell out the n-word;

· players were engaging in "penguin e-sex", sending and receiving explicit messages…

Disney acted accordingly and filed a copyright claim, we assume to protect the game’s reputation and ensure the safety of children who wanted to play the game.

Interestingly enough, not all servers were shut down. Like Club Penguin Rewritten, for example, that is now run on HTML5 rather than Adobe Flash Player (a quick shoutout to Adobe Flash Player – we’ll miss you too!) since last week, so it’s not even considered a Club Penguin Private Server anymore. You could even play it right now, like over eight million players have. In fact, if you search for Club Penguin, chances are you’ll get that as one of your first results. Little warning, however – it is a slightly older version of Club Penguin than the one we knew back in 2017. But in case you’re feeling nostalgic, it’s there, and it’s safe.

One thing is for certain, however. Club Penguin was one revolutionary game that will be remembered for generations. And I’ll continue "vibing" to some of their penguin-related jams. Waddle on!