My fellow 2000s children rise up, the most iconic (and now very much dead) game of our childhood Club Penguin could one day return. I can’t tell if this will save us all or accelerate the apocalypse.
Lance Priebe, the creator of Club Penguin, was asked on Twitter if he ever regretted selling the game to Disney, which marked its future demise.
“No regrets,” he wrote in a Tweet.
“Disney helped Club Penguin expand world wide and introduced millions of children to our exciting little world. I’m sad that it ended but I am confident it will one day return.”
No regrets. Disney helped Club Penguin expand world wide and introduced millions of children to our exciting little world. I’m sad that it ended but I am confident it will one day return.
— RocketSnail (@rocketsnail) March 14, 2023
Ummm, how confident? Confident as in because of its iconic status, or confident because you know something we don’t?
Yup. One day Club Penguin will return.
— RocketSnail (@rocketsnail) March 15, 2023
For those of you who were more Habbo girlies than Penguin kids, Club Penguin was a HUGE open-world multiplayer online game (we’re talking tens of millions of users) where you could take part in activities, play games and interact with other avatars (obviously the avatars were all penguins).
You had a little igloo home that you could decorate and open to visitors, and you could explore other rooms and environments in the virtual world.
The game was created in 2005 and totally blew up, becoming probably the most popular game of its kind when I was a wee child in the early 2000s to mid 2010s. Honestly, how many of you had your first bf/gf on that cursed-yet-beloved game?
Disney bought Club Penguin’s developers New Horizon Interactive in 2007, which catapulted it to new heights of usership as Priebe mentioned above.
In 2015, the game began to decline in popularity and in 2017, Disney officially pulled the plug.
Players were only given one day’s notice before the site was shut down forever, with a tragic message when people tried to log in the next day which said: “The connection has been lost. Thank you for playing Club Penguin. Waddle on!”
Club Penguin Island, the game’s spin-off, was also shut down a year after it was launched. And while fans of the game created plenty of bootleg-versions, those were taken down too after Disney hit them with copyright claims.
Club Penguin may be gone, but it is not forgotten, and it’ll live on in our hearts forever. Who knows, maybe one day, like our beloved Christ, it too shall return.
