My 2000s kids are on their feet, and the most iconic (and now dead) game of our childhood Club Penguin may return one day. I don’t know if this will save us all or hasten the end of the world.
Club Penguin creator Lance Priebe was asked on Twitter if he regretted selling the game to Disney, signaling its future demise.
“No regrets,” he wrote in a tweet.
“Disney helped expand Club Penguin globally and introduced millions of children to our exciting little world. I’m sad it’s over, but I’m sure it will return one day.
Well, how confident are you? Confidence because of its iconic status, or because you know something we don’t?
For those of you who are more Habbo girls than penguin kids, Club Penguin is a massive open-world multiplayer online game (we’re talking tens of millions of users) where you can join events, play games, and compete with other Avatar interaction (obviously the avatars are all penguins).
You have an igloo that you decorate and open up to visitors, and you can explore other rooms and environments in the virtual world.
Created in 2005, this game totally blew up and was probably the most popular game of its kind when I was a kid in the early 2000s to mid-2010s. Honestly, how many of you have your first bf/gf on this cursed but beloved game?
Disney bought Club Penguin developer New Horizon Interactive in 2007, and as Priebe mentioned above, its subscriber numbers reached new heights.
In 2015, the game’s popularity began to decline, and in 2017, Disney officially pulled the plug.
Players only received a day’s notice before the site shut down forever, and when people tried to log in the next day, a tragic message said: “The connection has been lost. Thanks for playing Club Penguin. Stagger!”
The game’s spinoff, Club Penguin, was also shut down a year after launch. While fans of the game created numerous bootleg versions, those were also removed after Disney cracked down on them with a copyright claim.
Club Penguin may be gone, but it will not be forgotten and will always live in our hearts. Who knows, maybe one day, like our beloved Christ, it will return.