Club Penguin
 Final logo, used from 2012 to 2017 | |
| Developer | New Horizon Interactive RocketSnail Games Disney Interactive Studios |
|---|---|
| Type | Massively multiplayer online game |
| Launched | October 24, 2005 |
| Discontinued | March 30, 2017 |
| Platform | Online (Adobe Flash) |
| Status | Discontinued and replaced by Club Penguin Island (March 30, 2017) |
| Website | Club Penguin website at the Wayback Machine (archived February 25, 2017) |
Club Penguin was a massively multiplayer online game (MMO) that ran from 2005 to 2017. The game featured a virtual world that included a wide range of online games and activities. It was created by New Horizon Interactive (now known as Disney Canada Inc.). Players used cartoon penguin avatars and played in an Antarctic-themed open world. After beta-testing, Club Penguin was made available to the general public on October 24, 2005. It expanded into a large online community, such that by late 2007, Club Penguin reported that there were more than 30 million user accounts. In July 2013, Club Penguin had more than 200 million registered user accounts.[1]
While free memberships were available, revenue was predominantly raised through paid memberships, which allowed players to access a range of additional features, such as the ability to purchase virtual clothing, furniture, and in-game pets called "Puffles" for their penguins through the usage of in-game currency. The success of Club Penguin led to New Horizon being purchased by the Walt Disney Company in August 2007 for the sum of 350 million U.S. dollars, with an additional 350 million dollars in bonuses if specific targets were met by 2009.[2]
The game was specifically designed for children aged 6 to 14; however, users of any age were allowed to play. Consequently a major focus of the developers was on child safety,[3] with several features facilitating this, including offering an "Ultimate Safe Chat" mode whereby users selected their comments from a menu, filtering that prevented swearing and the revelation of personal information,[3] and using moderators who patrolled the game.[4]
Club Penguin shut down its servers on March 30, 2017 following an announcement on January 30, 2017; the game was replaced by Club Penguin Island, which itself was discontinued the following year. Since being shut down, the original game has been hosted and recreated on a number of private servers using downloaded SWF files from the game's old website. Many of the private servers were shut down around May 15, 2020, after Digital Millennium Copyright Act filings by the Walt Disney Company were sent on May 13, 2020.[5][6] One of the most notable private servers, Club Penguin Rewritten, had launched on February 12, 2017, and accumulated an online community of more than 11 million users among the consequences and restrictions from the COVID-19 pandemic and its lockdowns. Rewritten was shut down on April 13, 2022, by the City of London Police in compliance with a copyright investigation request by Disney.[7][8][9]
Plot and gameplay
[edit]Club Penguin was divided into various rooms and distinct areas. Illustrator Chris Hendricks designed many of the first environments. Each player was provided with an igloo for a home. Members had the option of opening their igloo so other penguins could access it via the map, under "Member Igloos."[10] Members could also purchase larger igloos and decorate their igloos with items bought with virtual coins earned by playing mini-games.[11] At least one party per month was held on Club Penguin. In most cases, a free clothing item was available, both for paid members and free users. Some parties also provided member-only rooms which only paid members could access. Some major Club Penguin parties were its annual Halloween, Winter Holiday, and April Fools parties.[12][13] Following Disney's acquisition of the game, various parties were held themed around properties the company owned, such as Marvel and Star Wars.[14][15]
During parties, the game would be visited by special penguin mascots, controlled by employees, who would grant items if encountered in-game. Mascots included characters such as secret agent Gary the Gadget Guy, journalist Aunt Arctic, and pirate Rockhopper.[13]
History and development
[edit]Predecessors (2000–2004)
[edit]The first seeds of what would become Club Penguin began as a Flash 4 web-based game called Snow Blasters that developer Lance Priebe had been developing in his spare time in July 2000.[16][17][18] Priebe's attention was brought to penguins after he "happened to glance at a Far Side cartoon featuring penguins that was sitting on his desk."[19] The project was never finished, and instead morphed into Experimental Penguins. Experimental Penguins was released through Priebe's company of employment, the Kelowna, British Columbia, Canada-based online game and comic developer RocketSnail Games, in July 2000, though it ultimately went offline the following year.[20] It was used as the inspiration for Penguin Chat (also known as Penguin Chat 1), a similar game which was released shortly after Experimental Penguins' removal. Released January 2003, Penguin Football Chat (also known as Penguin Chat 2) was the second attempt at a penguin-themed MMORPG, and was created on FLASH 5 and used the same interface as Experimental Penguins.[21] The game contained various minigames; the premiere title of RocketSnail Games was Ballistic Biscuit, a game that would be placed into Experimental Penguins and eventually be adapted into Club Penguin's Hydro Hopper.[22] RocketSnails Games' Mancala Classic would also be placed into the game as Mancala.
Lance Priebe, as well as co-workers Lane Merrifield and Dave Krysko, started to formulate the Club Penguin concept when the trio were unsuccessful in finding "something that had some social components but was safe, and not just marketed as safe" for their own children.[23] Dave Krysko in particular wanted to build a safe social-networking site their kids could enjoy free of advertising.[24] In 2003, Merrifield and Priebe approached their boss, with the idea of creating a spinoff company to develop the new product.[25] The spin-off company would be known as New Horizon Interactive.
Early history (2004–2007)
[edit]Work commenced on the project in 2004, and the team settled on a name in the summer of 2005.[19] The developers used the previous project Penguin Chat 2 – which was still online – as a jumping-off point in the design process, while incorporating concepts and ideas from Experimental Penguins. Penguin Chat's third version was released in March 2005, and was used to test the client and servers of Club Penguin.[26] Variants of Penguin Chat 3 included Crab Chat, Chibi Friends Chat, Goat Chat, Ultra-Chat, and TV Chat. Users from Penguin Chat were invited to beta test Club Penguin in August 2005. The original plan was to release Club Penguin in 2010, but since the team had decided to fast-track the project, the first version of Club Penguin went live on October 24, 2005,[26] and four days later Penguin Chat servers were shut down. While Penguin Chat used ElectroServer, Club Penguin would use SmartFoxServer.[27] The developers financed their start-up entirely with their own credit cards and personal lines of credit, and maintained 100 percent ownership.[28] Club Penguin started with 15,000 users, and by March 2006 that number had reached 1.4 million—a figure which almost doubled by September, when it hit 2.6 million.[25] By the time Club Penguin was two years old, it had reached 3.9 million users, despite lacking a marketing budget.[29] The first mention of the game in The New York Times was in October 2006.[30] The following year, Club Penguin spokesperson Karen Mason explained: "We offer children the training wheels for the kinds of activities they might pursue as they get older."[31]
Acquisition by Disney (2007)
[edit]Although the three Club Penguin co-creators had turned down lucrative advertising offers and venture capital investments in the past,[25] in August 2007, they agreed to sell both Club Penguin and its parent company to Disney for the sum of $350.93 million.[32] In addition, the owners were promised bonuses of up to $350 million if they were able to meet growth targets by 2009.[33] Disney ultimately didn't pay the extra $350 million, as Club Penguin missed both profit goals.[34][35] At the point when it was purchased by Disney, Club Penguin had 11–12 million accounts, of which 700,000 were paid subscribers, and was generating $40 million in annual revenue.[32][28] In making the sale, Merrifield has stated that their main focus during negotiations was philosophical,[23] and that the intent was to provide themselves with the needed infrastructure in order to continue to grow.[citation needed] By late 2007, it was claimed that Club Penguin had over 30 million user accounts.[32] In December of that year, The New York Times asserted that the game "attracts seven times more traffic than Second Life."[36] Club Penguin was the 8th top social networking site in April 2008, according to Nielsen.[37]
After Disney's acquisition, Disney Interactive had four MMOs to simultaneously juggle: ToonTown, Pirates of the Caribbean Online, Pixie Hollow, and Club Penguin, with World of Cars set to follow soon. Lane Merrifield assured GlobalToyNews at the time that "it's a lot of worlds to manage, but we have really strong teams." Merrifield's role changed from taking a backseat in daily game design to focusing on overall branding and quality control of the virtual gaming properties. One of his roles was to merge the Club Penguin studio New Horizon Interactive in Kelowna (renamed to Disneyland Studios Canada) with Disneyland Studios LA. Disneyland Studios Canada focused its efforts on one product (with such features as multilingual versions), while Disneyland Studios LA focused on customer products and franchises of a wide selection of games. Merrifield was responsible for cross-pollinating both cultures.[38]
Franchising and growth (2007–2015)
[edit]Since the Disney purchase, Club Penguin continued to grow, becoming part of a larger franchise including video games, books, a television special, an anniversary song, and an app MMO. Disney often used the game as a cross-promotion opportunity when releasing new films such as Frozen, Zootopia, and Star Wars, having special themed events and parties to celebrate their releases.[39][40][41] The game forged an ever-growing mythology of characters and plot elements, including: a pirate, a journalist, and a secret agent.
In 2008, the first international office opened in Brighton, England, to personalise the level of moderation and player support. Later international office locations included São Paulo and Buenos Aires.[24] On March 11, 2008, Club Penguin released the Club Penguin Improvement Project.[42] This project allowed players to be part of the testing of new servers, which were put into use in Club Penguin on April 14, 2008.[43] Players had a "clone" of their penguin made to test these new servers for bugs and glitches.[44] The testing was ended on April 4, 2008.[45]
On June 20, 2011, the game's website temporarily crashed after the company let the Club Penguin domain name expire.[46] In September 2011, one of Club Penguin's minigames, Puffle Launch, was released on iOS as an app. Merrifield commented: "Kids are going mobile and have been asking for Club Penguin to go there with them."[47]
In late 2012, Merrifield left Disney Interactive to focus on his family and a new educational product, Freshgrade. Chris Heatherly took Merrifield's former position.[48] The company dropped the words "Online Studios" from its name[49][50] in 2013. As of July 2013, Club Penguin had over 200 million registered user accounts.[1] In 2013, Club Penguin hired singer and former Club Penguin player Jordan Fisher to record a song entitled It's Your Birthday, to commemorate Club Penguin's 8th anniversary.[51]
Decline and discontinuation (2015–2017)
[edit]In April 2015, it was revealed that Disney Interactive had laid off 28 members of Club Penguin's Kelowna headquarters due to the game's declining popularity.[52] The company's UK office in Brighton was shut down around April 17, 2015. Some employees in the Los Angeles office were also let go. Disney Interactive replied to Castanet on the layoffs: "Disney Interactive continually looks to find ways to create efficiencies and streamline our operations. As part of this ongoing process, we are consolidating a small number of teams and are undergoing a targeted reduction in workforce."[53]
On September 2, 2015, Club Penguin closed down the German and Russian versions of the site.[54] A spin-off mobile app, Puffle Wild, was removed from the App Store and Google Play the same day in order to allow Disney Interactive to focus on Club Penguin.[55] On January 11, 2016, the Sled Racer and SoundStudio apps (the former being an original game and the latter being a port of a game on the website) followed suit.[56] With the closure of Disney Interactive in 2015, Club Penguin side-projects wound down to allow a streamlined effort to focus on the core Club Penguin experience; this involved the layoffs of 30 Disney Studios Canada staff.[57]
On January 30, 2017, Club Penguin announced that the current game would be discontinued on March 29, 2017, to make way for its successor, Club Penguin Island.[58][59][60] Membership payments for the original game were no longer accepted as of January 31, 2017, with paid members slated to receive emails about membership and refunds.[61][62]
It became popular in the final weeks of Club Penguin for users to attempt speedruns to see how fast they could get banned from the game, by creating an account and entering profanity in the chat. The fastest times were under 40 seconds, with a tool-assisted speedrun (TAS) of 29 seconds.[63][64][65]
Days before the shut down, Club Penguin announced that on the final day of the game's operation, all users would be given a free membership until the servers were disconnected.[66]
Multiplayer transmissions stopped and, twenty seconds later on March 30, 2017 @ 00:01 PDT (07:01 UTC), Club Penguin's servers were officially shut down.[67] A message appeared on screen for all players, saying "The connection has been lost. Thank you for playing Club Penguin. Waddle on!"[67]
Design
[edit]Business model
[edit]Prior to being purchased by Disney, Club Penguin was almost entirely dependent on membership fees to produce a revenue stream.[3] The vast majority of users (90% according to The Washington Post) chose not to pay, instead taking advantage of the free play on offer.[11] Those who chose to pay did so because full (paid) membership was required to access all of the services, such as the ability to purchase virtual clothes for the penguins and buy decorations for igloos,[68] and because peer pressure created a "caste system," separating paid from unpaid members.[69] Advertising, both in-game and on-site, was not incorporated into the system, although some competitors chose to employ it, including: Whyville, which used corporate sponsorship,[70] and Neopets, which incorporated product placements.[71]
An alternative revenue stream came through the development of an online merchandise shop, which opened on the Club Penguin website in August 2006,[72] selling stuffed Puffles and T-shirts. Key chains, gift cards, and more shirts were added on November 7, 2006.[73] In October 2008, a series of plush toys based on characters from Club Penguin, were made available online (both through the Club Penguin store and Disney's online store), and in retail outlets.[74]
As with one of its major rivals, Webkinz, Club Penguin traditionally relied almost entirely on word-of-mouth advertising to increase its membership base.[75]
Child safety
[edit]Club Penguin was designed for the ages of 6–14.[76] Thus, one of the major concerns when designing Club Penguin was how to improve both the safety of participants and the suitability of the game to children. As Lane Merrifield stated, "the decision to build Club Penguin grew out of a desire to create a fun, virtual world that I and the site's other two founders would feel safe letting our own children visit."[77] As a result, Club Penguin maintained a strong focus on child safety,[78] to the point where the security features were described as almost "fastidious" and "reminiscent of an Orwellian dystopia",[79] although it was also argued that this focus might "reassure more parents than it alienate[d]."[79]
The system employed a number of different approaches in an attempt to improve child safety. The key approaches included preventing the use of inappropriate usernames;[80] providing an "Ultimate Safe Chat" mode, which limited players to selecting phrases from a list;[78] using an automatic filter during "Standard Safe Chat" (which allowed users to generate their own messages)[81] and blocked profanity even when users employed "creative" methods to insert it into sentences;