In 2007, the Walt Disney Company purchased the online game Club Penguin for a whopping 700 million dollars. This purchase saw promise for Disney as the game quickly gained interest. In just five years of Disney’s ownership, the game experienced nearly 1000% growth in active players.
This growth gave Disney the opportunity to make money by taking advantage of its players. Disney changed the game, so players now had to pay to play the games that they originally enjoyed. However, this wasn’t taken lightly and Disney faced criticism for introducing paid subscription plans. Players who had enjoyed the simplicity of the game without payment barriers found their beloved game transformed by the pursuit of profit.
Disney’s hunger for money destroyed the game and when paying for what was originally free got old, players began to lose interest. To prevent money loss, Disney announced in January of 2017 that they would discontinue the game.
“Club Penguin was a really fun and awesome game that I thoroughly enjoyed,” senior Sam Durham said. “However, the online world was losing players as it struggled to stay on top of updating the game.”
As of March 30, 2017, all Club Penguin servers were officially shut down. That was, until fans’ desire for the game led to many lawsuits and the creation of several recreations of the game.
Promptly after the game shut down, a number of anonymous developers took to recreating new versions of the game using Small Web Format (SWF) files from the original game’s website. A very notable server was Club Penguin Rewritten, which brought in approximately 11 million players. The main reason many players were so eager to get back to the snowy world was the return of its free-to-play capability. The game they remembered was back.
“The thing I enjoyed most was that I no longer had to worry about begging my mom to buy me the Club Penguin membership subscription,” Durham says, “The new versions of the game gave me the same opportunities as everyone else.”
In April 2022, The City of London Police shut down Club Penguin Rewritten in compliance with a copyright investigation by Disney. At this point, all hope was lost for the return of the fun and harmless game.
Presently, the game occasionally rises from the dead in various forms under anonymous names, but with lack of players and the game not being monetized, these servers don’t last long. At this point, players must let the game go.
