How Club Penguin Changed My Life
“Club Penguin is Shutting Down,” says TechCrunch.
“Club Penguin Is Shutting Down And People Are Shook,” says Buzzfeed.
“Club Penguin is shutting down and everyone is sad,” says USA Today.
Everyone loves a good headline, especially writers who depend on clicks to survive.
This week, the Club Penguin Team announced that the desktop version of CP will be closing down after 11 years online. If you want to be more accurate, the original prototype of Club Penguin dates back to 1999, which means that it’s actually closer to 18 years old.
Of course, just like the content itself, the headlines aren’t that accurate… the team aren’t “shutting down Club Penguin.” Instead, they’re replacing the old game with a new one on mobile devices called Club Penguin Island.
“Club Penguin set to close, breaking hearts worldwide.”
It’s difficult to explain just how significant Club Penguin has been to so many people. And not just the kids who played CP regularly.
Hundreds of talented people have supported and worked on Club Penguin, and each one of them has a unique story about the history of CP and their memories of it. Some have gone on to launch new companies, like FreshGrade, Hyper Hippo Games, Neptune Analytics, and Two Hat Security, while others have joined established companies, offering their talents to Facebook, LinkedIn, Activision Blizzard, Shopify, Capcom, Amazon, Airbnb, Medium, the LEGO Group, and more.
In fact, many Club Penguin players have gone on to join these companies, such as Michael Sayman, who became Facebook’s youngest product manager at 20 years old.
For context – Club Penguin was acquired for over $350 million, and now has over 300 million penguin accounts.
And it all started with a single idea by a guy named Lance. And a single image….
The Penguin and the Banana Peel.
The original version of Club Penguin (first known as Experimental Penguins and then Penguin Chat) was created by Lance Priebe in his basement with help from folks around the globe, such as an artist in Europe and code support from his brother Chris Priebe in Belize.
Lance was inspired to create the idea after someone gave him a card with this Far Side comic on it. The Priebes have always had a silly sense of humour, so it only seems appropriate that a comic strip with a penguin slipping on a banana peel would inspire a massively-multiplayer online snowball war game called SnowBlasters.
Of course, the SnowBlasters idea was too big, so he whittled the idea down to something smaller: Experimental Penguins, later called Penguin Chat.
When Lane Merrifield joined the New Horizon Productions team, he and Lance joined forces to expand Penguin Chat into a bigger vision. The two knew kids were going to be online, and they wanted to give them all a safe place to socialise with each other if they were going to be there anyways. They pitched the idea to their boss, Dave Krysko — who agreed to fund the vision.
In 2005, Club Penguin was born.
If It Takes A Village To Raise A Child, How Many Villages Does It Take To Raise Millions of Children?
I joined the Club Penguin in 2006, a year after it launched.
At the time, I wasn’t even sure that it was a real business. Would I get a paycheck? Could I feed my kids with this?
I had no idea that I would end up exchanging my brain power and typing skills for paychecks from Club Penguin for the next 8 years.
The first time I set foot in a Club Penguin office, we were on the fourth floor of the Landmark 5 building in Kelowna. At that time, the entire team including community support and the development team were on the same floor. The room I entered was full of round tables full of computers, keyboards, and young people drinking Coca-Cola. My first impression was that it looked like a church youth group (which was probably truer than I realized.)
I met Lance a few days after I joined. He asked if I wanted to join the accounting team after I told him that I was previously an accountant. Thankfully for both of us, I suggested that I’d rather not be an accountant.
During my time at Club Penguin, I did just about as many different things as I could possibly imagine. I wrote support emails, took billing phone calls, set up display cases in the office, and sifted through Flash files to extract sketches for trading cards. I briefly managed word filter updates with Lance, tested features as QA and logged bugs, took photos, collected files and napkins for the archives (I share a bit about that on the Video Game History Hour podcast), learned to become a manager, and aspired to become a leader.
I rewrote the scripts for the CP Nintendo games with my team, created original music and videos with them, created a pseudo-TV show called the Spoiler Alert with them, launched Club Penguin’s social media accounts, and wrote as almost every fictional and non-fictional character in the CP canon. I’ve secretly written as Aunt Arctic, Rockhopper, Sensei, Billybob, and even Happy77. The Happy77 on YouTube in 2012? Spoiler alert, kids: that was secretly Polo Field and Businesmoose. Nyan Puffle? You’re welcome.
But here’s the thing — none of that matters! All of the mountains of work that I did for CP was just a drop in the bucket! Club Penguin is so vast and massive that it takes an army of people to make it work. So even though I did a whole bunch of random stuff for CP, so did hundreds of other people around the world.
As the World of Warcraft team could tell you — running an MMO is a lot of work.
It takes many, many villages to raise millions of children.
New Horizons
Two projects stand out as most significant to me during my time at Disney: the first is a spelling mistake that was immortalized across thousands and thousands of packages — Card-Jitsu.
Have I mentioned that I’ve made many mistakes during my career? The most embarrassing of them all was the realization that “ninjitsu” is actually spelt “ninjutsu.” Of course, I didn’t realize this until years later when a teen player pointed out that my name suggestion should have actually been spelt “Card-Jutsu.” Oops.
The second project was a more ambitious one — I set out to make a feature-length documentary film about the creation of Club Penguin called “New Horizons.” Over the course of a month, Johnny and I interviewed dozens of current and former team members to capture a variety of perspectives on the history of Club Penguin. All in, we captured at least a full week’s worth of interviews, along with hundreds of gigabytes of photos, sketches, notebook scans, and source files from which to create our masterpiece.
We poured our hearts into the first chapter — a four-minute story constructed from hundreds of images and clips. We used my handwriting as transitions between the sections of the video, and recreated scenes from the original 1999 and 2003 games in 1080p (thanks to Adobe Flash files being vector-based!) We even matched the fonts with the exact typefaces used in the original New Horizon Productions logo to ensure that we captured every detail of the history.
Unfortunately, since the first part took so long to build, we couldn’t continue work on the full-length movie and had to scrap it. We made rough cuts of parts 2 and 3, but they were never finished or released. The lesson here is to get started and finished as fast as possible, before competing priorities invade.
One day, we will make the Club Penguin documentary that we started in 2012. Even if I cut one myself just for the team. There’s a captivating story there, and it deserves to be told.
Of Love and Penguins
It is an understatement when I say that Club Penguin changed my life. Thanks to Lance’s code and art and ideas, Lane’s passion for community building and storytelling, Dave’s mentorship, credit card, faith, and a whole lot of luck, I was part of the journey of a lifetime.
I spent an hour with Dave Smith, the man trusted by Walt Disney to create and protect the Disney Archives. I gave Jon Voight a puffle and told him to give it to one of the grandkids (I hope he did!) I attended private events and flew on a private jet once or twice. I got to learn all about how drivers in L.A. help their celebrity passengers avoid the paparazzi.
I got to name a whole series of trading card games (Card-Jitsu), as well as pick out all the art and write the flavour text for the first set. I got to help create a character I love (Sensei), though I prefer his original name when he first appeared in the game in 2008 (??????). A few of us had to work hard to convince people that he should have a question mark name when he first appeared, and I’m glad we fought for that.
I even had my own penguin name immortalised when Lane Merrifield passed the baton of the Club Penguin blog on to me, Polo Field, entrusting me to preserve the spirit of community that he believed in so strongly.
I was unbelievably lucky.
Club Penguin was a huge factor in my children’s lives, too. I made my first daughter’s account when she was six, and my second daughter’s account when she was only three years old (probably quite a bit too soon, but I thought it would be cool to collect items for her over the years.)
Throughout the years, my kids were surrounded by Club Penguin. As they grew up, I bought them hundreds of dollars worth of CP toys, games, and other merchandise. When they were much younger, they were quite proud to say that their dad worked at Club Penguin.
On top of all of that, I also met my girlfriend on Club Penguin.
Wait… actually, that wording sounds kind of weird doesn’t it? Awkward. Sorry, couldn’t resist.
Actually, I met my girlfriend at and because of Club Penguin since we both worked there. I realized I was falling in love with her after she moved from England to Canada, and eventually wrote her a long letter explaining my feelings.
So while I was off being Polo Field, the Club Penguin blogger, she was off pretending to be Aunt Arctic, the editor of the Club Penguin Times.
Basically, the artist formerly known as Polo Field is dating the artist formerly known as Aunt Arctic. Crazy, huh?
Once again, to say that Club Penguin changed my life would be an understatement. Like other people that poured out a significant chunk of their energy into that iceberg, it can be tough to watch from a distance because of how invested so many of us were in the Club Penguin community.
Stuck in the Past
I can see why there are so many ‘broken-hearted’ Club Penguin players. Being someone who has spent many years so deeply entrenched in the Club Penguin community, it’s easy to see how many fans are mourning as the news spreads across media outlets and schoolyards.
As a retro gamer, I can always go back and play the classics — I can head to the Portland Retro Gaming Expo and pick up a copy of Super Mario Bros. 3 if I want to relive a moment from my childhood. But what about Club Penguin players? And what about all the many other Adobe Flash games out there that will be rendered unplayable through the evolution of technology? Tinkatolli or Planet Cazmo, anyone?
Many teen CP players continue to use their Penguin identities as their avatars on other social media channels like YouTube and Twitter. Why? Because that specific assortment of items represents them and their sense of identity. Their avatar is deeply personal, and an expression of what they want to be.
And that’s where I’m excited about the next phase for Club Penguin. With the ability to customize their own items, rather than just buying existing templates, CP players will have a lot more freedom of expression with this new “Club Penguin Island” app. I know that some very smart people worked on the app, and they were excited to start fresh for the first time in CP history. There hasn’t been a truly “new” Club Penguin since Experimental Penguins evolved into Penguin Chat, and it’s nice to see the brilliant creative team here in Canada building something new and exciting from scratch.
As for me, I’m also excited to be building new things from scratch. Inspired by working on the original Card-Jitsu, I’m making my own card game called CollectorEgg that has that same sort of ‘archival’ feel to it.
Instead of seeing this news as “Club Penguin is shutting down”, I think we should see it differently — Club Penguin is closing the door on a major chapter in its story. A story that I’m thankful that I got to be a part of, and hope to one day capture in the documentary I’ve been dreaming about since I pitched the idea of the Club Penguin Archives back in 2007.
If nothing else, I am most thankful for meeting the love of my life thanks to Club Penguin. I’m not sure how else I would have met this amazing woman from England. Together, we share years and years worth of CP historical knowledge in our hearts and brains from both the Canadian and English offices. In a selfish way, I like to pretend that this whole massive Club Penguin success story thing happened just to bring the two of us together.
That’s the power of Club Penguin right there — to each of us, CP has its own huge personal story. From the team and former team members to the players who prioritize CP above all other games. Each of us has many memories related to this little Adobe Flash MMO.
Here’s the product lesson to learn from Club Penguin’s epic journey:
1) Start small
2) Dream big
3) Have a burning desire to succeed
4) Have faith
5) Make a clear plan
6) Be persistent
7) Celebrate community
And it all starts with just one simple idea seed.
Thank you for reading, and to the Club Penguin player community for being so encouraging and welcoming throughout all the years. Feel free to leave a response post with your own reflections and memories if you’d like — I always enjoy reading people’s unique perspectives on things, and I do love a great story.
Until then… Waddle on.
