Club Penguin
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The story

What was Club Penguin?

An online world of penguins, puffles and parties that ran from 2005 to 2017, and still means a lot to the people who grew up there.

An island for everyone

Club Penguin was an online world set on a snowy island. You made a penguin, picked its colour and waddled from room to room: chatting with other penguins, decorating your igloo, adopting puffles and playing minigames for coins. Almost every month the whole island dressed up for a party, from pirate adventures to holiday celebrations, with free items to collect and famous penguins to meet (Club Penguin Wiki).

It was made with children in mind. Its safety features included Ultimate Safe Chat, where players picked phrases from a list, and paid moderators (Wikipedia). Playing was free. An optional membership, $5.95 a month or $57.95 a year as reported in 2009, paid for extras like clothes for your penguin and things for your igloo (The Globe and Mail).

A snowy Club Penguin landscape with a striped lighthouse, snow-covered trees and a ski hill with a chairlift
The island's snowy hills, from the 2017 Club Penguin website.

Before the island (2000 to 2005)

The story starts with Lance Priebe and his small games site, RocketSnail. In July 2000 he launched Experimental Penguins, where players named a penguin, chatted and explored four rooms. About a year later, server costs forced him to shut it down. A rebuilt version, Penguin Chat, followed in January 2003 (RocketSnail).

Priebe and his co-workers Lane Merrifield and Dave Krysko, in Kelowna, British Columbia, couldn't find "something that had some social components but was safe, and not just marketed as safe" for their own children, so they set out to build it, in a new company of their own called New Horizon Interactive. Work began in 2004, and the name Club Penguin was chosen in the summer of 2005 (Wikipedia). Priebe built filters that screened out rude words and anything that could give away who a player really was (The Globe and Mail).

Launch (2005)

Penguin Chat players were invited to test Club Penguin in August 2005 (Wikipedia); the fan-edited Club Penguin Wiki dates the test to 22 August. On 21 September the island threw its first ever party, the Beta Test Party: two sessions of two hours each, to see how many penguins the servers could hold (Club Penguin Wiki). The game opened to everyone on 24 October 2005 (RocketSnail). The island's own newspaper, The Penguin Times, printed its first issue that same day, and a new one came out every week for more than ten years (Club Penguin Wiki).

A month later, in November 2005, penguins spotted the first puffles: small, round, fluffy pets that soon became part of island life (Club Penguin Wiki). And the island grew fast: about 15,000 registered accounts in October 2005, and 1.4 million by March 2006 (Wikipedia).

Joining Disney (2007)

On 1 August 2007, The Walt Disney Company announced that it was buying Club Penguin. The game then had more than 700,000 paying subscribers and more than 12 million activated accounts, mostly in the United States and Canada, and all three founders stayed on to run it (Disney's announcement). The price was reported as $350 million in cash, plus up to $350 million more if performance targets were met through 2009 (VentureBeat).

Growing up (2006 to 2013)

Year after year the island added new places, games and friends. A few milestones, with dates from the fan-edited Club Penguin Wiki, which cites the game's own blog and newspaper (the pages are listed under Sources):

  1. The Pet Shop opens, and penguins adopt their first puffles.
  2. Cart Surfer arrives in the Mine.
  3. Captain Rockhopper docks his ship, the Migrator, for the first time.
  4. Pizzatron 3000 starts making pizzas in the Pizza Parlor.
  5. Card-Jitsu comes to the Dojo.
  6. The Elite Penguin Force first appears, in a Nintendo DS game.
  7. Stamps arrive: 107 to collect at first, and 352 by the end.
  8. More than 200 million registered accounts (Wikipedia).

Famous faces

Some penguins (and one polar bear) were famous all over the island. Their details come from the Club Penguin Wiki.

  • Portrait of RockhopperRockhopperPirate captain of the Migrator, who sails with Yarr, his red puffle.
  • Portrait of Aunt ArcticAunt ArcticThe island's advice columnist in the newspaper, from May 2006.
  • Portrait of Gary the Gadget GuyGary the Gadget GuyThe inventor. Most of his gadgets end in "3000".
  • Portrait of CadenceCadenceA DJ, first met at the Dance-a-thon party in January 2009.
  • Portrait of SenseiSenseiThe wise old master of the Dojo, who teaches Card-Jitsu.
  • Portrait of Herbert P. BearHerbert P. BearThe polar bear villain, helped by Klutzy the crab.

Goodbye, island (2017 to 2018)

On 30 January 2017, Club Penguin announced that the game would close at the end of March (Wikipedia). New memberships stopped, and accounts would not move to the new app that was replacing it (Delisted Games). The newspaper's final issue, number 566, came out on 22 March 2017, a week before the end (Club Penguin Wiki).

The servers went off on 30 March 2017 at 12:01 in the morning, Pacific time. Penguins still online saw one last message: "The connection has been lost. Thank you for playing Club Penguin. Waddle on!" (Wikipedia)

The new app, Club Penguin Island, was built with Unity, first for phones and later for computers. It launched worldwide in late March 2017 and closed on 20 December 2018 (Wikipedia).

Fans kept waddling (2017 to today)

Lots of players weren't ready to say goodbye. Fans rebuilt the game on their own servers, and some grew very big.

That brought problems, too. In May 2020 a BBC investigation found hateful and unsafe messages on one popular fan server, where the chat filters had been switched off. Disney then sent copyright complaints to fan servers, and that one shut down days later (Kotaku). In April 2022 another big one, Club Penguin Rewritten, closed at Disney's request after City of London Police got involved (TechCrunch, Kotaku).

On 24 October 2025, Club Penguin turned 20. That history is why this island is 13+ and takes chat seriously. Here's how we keep it friendly.

Where this island fits

This island keeps the game's 2017 files playable, for learning and for nostalgia: the same rooms, games and art, running in today's browsers. It is a free fan project, it is not affiliated with Disney, and it makes no money. Read about the project, see the games you can play, or find out whether Club Penguin is back.

Penguins in the Town, outside the Coffee Shop, the Dance Club and the Clothes Shop
The Town, captured in this game.

You'll need a free penguin to play, and making one takes about a minute.

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Sources