Club Penguin

> *"Waddle around and meet new friends!"*
>
>

**Club Penguin** (usually abbreviated as "CP") is a Massively Multiplayer Online game created originally by New Horizon Interactive in 2005 and was later on bought by Disney Interactive Studios in late 2007.

More than just a game, Club Penguin was intended to be a virtual world. Club Penguin featured several mini-games, EPF/PSA missions, had three individual videogames besides the original for DS and Wii, and had a new party every month. CP was the first game to feature parties and it was a success. The main objective of Club Penguin is to do and be whatever you want, it's a child-friendly chat and roleplay where you can create your own avatars in the form of penguins. Roleplay is the main thing that makes CP fun.

## History

### Founding

Before Club Penguin day-viewed in 2005, it came in the form of several other projects by Rocketsnail Games and it's founders; Lance Priebe and Lane Merrifield. The first of these was one in 2000 titled "Experimental Penguins" as a test. Lance Priebe had the concept of making a family-friendly chat for a while, and chose penguins as the focus of the virtual world because they were easy to animate and he was inspired by a newspaper comic strip.

Experimental Penguins was still around for a short time during the early 2010's (despite being made in 2000), but was later taken down. There was a mini-game based on Soccer originally on it, which is thought to have inspired the Stadium's soccer-theme. It was very basic, having only a few rooms and 5 pre-set avatars to choose from.

As time progressed and CP (before it was technically even CP) evolved, it took on a few more incarnations. Penguin Chat 2 was created in 2003, a successor to Experimental Penguins; and later on, Penguin Chat 3 in 2005. Penguin Chat 3 looked a lot like the early Club Penguin-days compared to the predecessors. Penguin Chat 3 featured many well-known CP features today such as an early Penguin Band, Boiler Room, Night Club, igloo, and etc.

On October 24th, 2005, Club Penguin was officially launched. Emails were sent out to Penguin Chat 3 users to beta test Club Penguin and during it's early days, it was on Miniclip as well. For the whole 24 hours of it's beta run, all the users online were able to receive a very rare Party Hat. This party hat, often nicknamed the "Beta Hat" was pink and yellow, and is the most sought after item in Club Penguin history.

### Financial Success

Club Penguin's popularity skyrocketed compared to it's predecessors. Club Penguin was all over the place and had several users on, it was a hit.

Due to it being a smashing hit, New Horizon Interactive and it's employees, Lance Priebe and Lane Merrifield were forced to expand. They went from having a small office to renting a far bigger building, hiring way more moderators and staff, and making a very big change. Membership wasn't a thing during the beta run of Club Penguin, and most of the earliest CP items were available to non-members. Membership was created very early on in it's production to fund the game, though not very necessary at the time.

By May of 2007 alone, it had reached an estimated value of 217 million unique users worldwide.

### Deal with Disney

Many players today blame Disney for everything bad with Club Penguin. However, Lance Priebe himself stated that they weren't sure if Club Penguin would be able to sustain itself as long as it did if Disney didn't acquire it. Most of these players don't even realize how early on Disney had bought CP. CP was up for a little over a year of it's ten-year current lifespan before it was bought by Disney.

In August of 2007, Disney Interactive Studios bought the rights to Club Penguin for $700 million. Most of the staff prior to the deal continued to work for the website, such as Billybob (Lane Merrifield), Happy77, and several other familiar faces. Rsnail (Lance Priebe) was the first to leave the Club Penguin crew, but still came in to check by every now and then, he even in 2009 did all of the original Card Jitsu work. Billybob and several other mods and bloggers continued to program and run the site up until the late 2010's.

### Downfall and Rumors of Closing

Once Billybob and many of the former staff left, several Disney employees took their place. Several in particular can be found under the names of Spike Hike and Polo Field. However, Polo Field later resigned during late 2015.

This is really when CP started taking a turn for the worst. With all of the original staff gone, it was just left up to the "new guys". With what I'm sure would be pressure from Disney corporate themselves, several "ad parties" took place on Disney, starting in 2012 with the annual Music Jam advertising Disney's live-action series "Shake It Up". These were minor at first, but then it became more apparent as more parties were solely focused on these franchises.

Many of the later "ad parties" were especially lazily done. It got to the point where eventually even the regular parties were being lazily done and put together. Several of these parties didn't even decorate every room and were obviously done with very little effort. Some of the annual and beloved parties such as the Medieval Party weren't even continued anymore after 2013 and parties just became some shittily few-done rooms, a little catalog of 10 or so items themed for the party, and that's it. Even the regular items weren't that great either. CP took a different style, which made most items look "fat" or "ugly" on the player. Even when many players disagreed with this and cried out it in outrage, "new CP" did nothing about it and ignored it's playerbase. This, in addition to it's bad parties really killed CP.

Less and less people continued playing, and even less people bought membership. As of March 2016, only one server remains active, and even then it doesn't have as much people as it used to -- Blizzard.

Rumors spread about CP closing soon in 2016 or at the very latest, 2017. It was rumored that it wouldn't be closing until at least 2017 because of Disney's renewal of their trademarks and other documentation. But it's clear to see it won't be lasting long due to the shrunken profits. Disney even supports this themselves, seeing as they've closed many other language versions of CP. English CP still remains semi-populated, but other languages are long gone.

### Legacy

Club Penguin's ignorance of the players over the years is what caused it's eventual death. Club Penguin Private Servers took advantage of this and actually listened to their players.

Where Club Penguin failed them with not giving them the items they wanted and restricting the chat filter so much you can barely even say simple greetings like "Hi, I'm \_\_\_\_", CPPSes gave users those freedoms.

I, myself Forbidden Prince writing this have even suggested Club Penguin take advantage of the features CPPSes offer to gain their playerbase back. But I was given a half-assed email back. It's clear to see that Club Penguin still has potential in the market today, especially with the success of CPPSme still going strong. All they had to do was maybe add some more teen-oriented servers with looser filters, slap some glows on it, go back to the old-way of creating items (which would be as easy as adding an item hue changer or recoloring existing items), and that's all. At the very least, it's good to see CPPSes following these steps Disney forgot to do.

## Roleplay

As stated previously, what really made Club Penguin come to life more than the games itself, was the roleplay community. Everyone without a doubt in the CP playerbase has at least roleplayed once.

Roleplay is a reoccuring theme throughout CP, as you can see people doing it in places such as the Pizza Parlor, asking for pizza, tipping the waiters, etc. People are seen saying things such as "is waiter", "is did" (dead), "hugs", and more on a regular basis.

CP started out with a very basic filter and people were even allowed to say numbers and use other characters. This was eventually changed so that players could only use alphabetical numbers, due to fear of players giving out addresses and phone numbers. CP's filter got stricter and stricter by the year, and it made it hard to say even some basic things. This is why CP lingo was created. CP lingo is what players use to communicate when the filter fails them, it's usually as simple as replacing the first letter of a word or just manipulating words and vowel sounds to sound like the word. Players typically ask if something showed to know what and what doesn't show with the filter.

### Common CP Lingo

* did = dead
* will/wills/willed = kill/kills/killed
* ticks = kicks
* lunches = punches
* odd = god

and so on...

## See Also

* CPPSes - Club Penguin Private Servers, individual websites running a clone version of Club Penguin.
* Club Penguin's Official Twitter
* Rocketsnail Games - The website of Lance Priebe/Rsnail's