![]() ![]() At its peak, hundreds of millions of players from over 200 countries were waddling around this frosty digital playground, spending their time ice fishing, sled racing, fitting their penguins with stylish accessories, or leafing through its virtual weekly newspaper, The Penguin Times. The game was envisioned as an online space for children that was actually safe to use - a goal that was accomplished, in part, by encouraging users to rat out their peers for inappropriate behavior. A virtual world where players - typically between the ages of 6 and 14 - embodied penguins in a browser-based cartoon chatroom, Club Penguin originally launched in 2005 and was acquired by Disney in 2007 for $350 million. The dramatic, unceremonious conclusion to Club Penguin Rewritten is just the latest in the strange saga of Club Penguin, a once-popular massively multiplayer online game that, despite being long abandoned by its corporate overlord Disney, somehow just won’t die. While the three suspects were later released, the Club Penguin Rewritten website remained under control of the police’s intellectual property enforcement unit, drawing the curtains on a fan-made game whose users reportedly numbered in the millions. Inhabitants of the ice-capped cartoon world of Club Penguin Rewritten, the largest unofficial offshoot of the antarctic open-world game, were banished to digital hell when the City of London Police raided the website for copyright infringement and arrested three people in connection to the site. The victims were not chinstrap penguins, nor adorable Adélies, but a species possibly even more endangered in the wild: Club Penguin players. Reading about their closure was devastating, especially since they put a lot of effort into this project and effort into building their own community.Earlier this April, a pitiless culling of penguins suddenly took place. “One moment the Town was thriving, the next, the game crashed in just the blink of an eye. ![]() “The news hit me like a giant shockwave,” said Charles. That’s one reason why the end of Rewritten came as much as a surprise to New Club Penguin’s team as to everyone else. ![]() Unlike Club Penguin Online, New Club Penguin and Club Penguin Rewritten both have staff moderators and chat filtering software, just like the original Club Penguin did. Zadie Smith Never Should Have Listened to Her Critics Why Marion Cotillard Is Freaking Out Over the Divorce of a Boy Band Member and Game of Thrones Actress We continue to enforce our rights against this, and other, unauthorised uses of the Club Penguin game.”Ī New Star Couple Has Emerged From the Wreckage of Celebrity Divorce Summer, and Nobody Knows How to Handle It Among them was the very popular Club Penguin Online a BBC investigation found a lack of moderation led to racist content and child safety concerns on the server.Īt that time, Disney issued a statement: “Child safety is a top priority for the Walt Disney Company and we are appalled by the allegations of criminal activity and abhorrent behaviour on this unauthorised website that is illegally using the Club Penguin brand and characters for its own purposes. New Club Penguin launched in the summer of 2020, after a wave of Digital Millennium Copyright Act notices that closed many other private Club Penguin servers. At one point during the pandemic, Rewritten’s representatives said they had 30,000 new people joining every day. One of these was Club Penguin Rewritten: With the same features as Club Penguin-many of them free, as opposed to being limited to the paid membership of the original-it became incredibly popular. But players found they could still get their fix on various unofficial, copycat servers that cloned the game. Though the company launched a new alternative, the mobile game Club Penguin Island, it wasn’t the same, and it too was shut down in just under two years. But I was determined to do whatever it took to be a cartoon penguin again.ĭisney ended its online role-playing game Club Penguin in 2017, to the dismay of longtime players and nostalgic fans. Downloading the link to the game’s app conjured flashbacks to the many times I accidentally downloaded malware as a young, unsavvy Internet preteen. I’m 27 years old, but I still felt a thrill, as though I was doing something clandestine and forbidden by inputting my own email address into the “parent’s email” box to sign up for an account.
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