THE COVE, Club Penguin—In a normally secluded corner of Club Penguin, a lavish dance party is underway. The guests are dressed in feathers, by default, but also in elaborate guises of wigs and hats and fairy wings. They have strange little furry creatures by their sides. And they’re waiting for the end of the world.
Club Penguin, the combination massive multiplayer game and social network aimed at middle schoolers, launched in 2005 and was acquired by Disney for a cool $700 million two years later. It ballooned in popularity, reaching 200 million users in 2013, before declining to under 6 million visitors in December 2016. Disney then announced that that they would be shutting down the site altogether on March 29 to make way for an entirely new, mobile-only version, news that was devastating to those who still play and those who remember it. I should know, because I used to play back when Club Penguin was in the early days of its popularity. And I’m about to join those ranks again.
I do my homework before diving back into the world of puffles and penguins by reading a Wikihow called “How to Cope With Modern Club Penguin Society,” which I assume will be full of practical advice for old-timers like me but is mostly a lament about how the quiet charm of Club Penguin has succumbed to the unyielding march of progress. “Accept that Club Penguin is ruined,” the post advises. “There’s not much you can do about all the annoying toddlers, drama, cliques, prostitutes, or virtual changes on the island.” I have to double back to make sure I’ve read that sentence correctly the first time. Huh.
Loins girded against the den of sin I’m apparently about to wade into, I click “Create a Penguin” and get started.
The first sign that this is not the Club Penguin I knew and loved in the aughts is the fashion catalog. Even 10 years ago, Club Penguin was unapologetically consumerist, with players eagerly earning coins for the sole purpose of accumulating as much stuff as possible for their penguin avatars. But now the Penguin catalog models wouldn’t look out of place at an Arctic Coachella. Club Penguin users are a stylish bunch, even if that style is sometimes “wear every item of clothing I own at the same time.” That self-expression comes at a cost, paid for with coins earned from hours of in-game fishing, sled racing, and jiu-jitsu, or with real-world cash: While Club Penguin is technically free to play, it takes real money to get ahead, and most of the swag and a bit of the gameplay is limited to paying members.
Screenshot by Marissa Martinelli
I am not about to shell out for a virtual flower crown, so I stick to the few options available to me and get a Press Cap to identify myself as a member of the media. Out of nostalgia, I do buy a puffle, one of the fluffy, big-eyed pets that made the game such a delight as a child. Back in my day, I remember only two kinds of puffle: red and blue. Now they come in every color of the rainbow, and in some offbeat varieties like cats and aliens and, sadly, one resembling Olaf, the snowman from Frozen, making it impossible to forget even for five minutes that this is Disney’s turf.
Enough fooling around. I’m here to get in touch with the modern Club Penguin user, not to shop, so for research, I make my way over to the offices of Club Penguin’s newspaper, the Club Penguin Times. Those offices are located over the town’s café and share the space with the town library and a cluster of mancala tables, suggesting something of a scrappy operation—though how that can be is a mystery, given that there’s literally no competition anywhere else on the island.
The current newspaper’s front page, it should be noted, is pretty blasé, with A1 dominated by a photo of the island’s celebrities—Jet Pack Guy; DJ Cadence; the enigmatic pirate captain Rockhopper, whose sightings are reported with almost religious reverence—and the caption “What a journey!” No doom and gloom about the impending end of the world, which isn’t much of a surprise, since the newspaper’s editor is Aunt Arctic, who, I have it on good authority, is in Disney’s pocket. The entire site is operating under a knockoff “Keep Calm” slogan: “Waddle On.” It’s up to me, then, to report the truth.
I teleport to the forest, where a few penguins are milling about. “What do you think about Club Penguin ending in a few days?” I ask the room at large. No one responds, but one penguin’s puffle farts into the snow, leaving a crevice from which a sack of money emerges. Hm. This may be tougher than I thought.
“What are you planning to do once it ends?” I try, approaching a penguin with a mohawk and a ninja mask.
“Cry,” comes the reply.
“Will you join the new mobile game?”
“Nah,” he says and then teleports away. It’s tough being a journalist in a world where your source can literally vanish before your eyes when he or she’s tired of talking to you.
Even if the site itself has grown, it is remarkable how little has changed about Club Penguin users since I played in the late ’00s. Sure, there’s a lot more talk of memes and “FAKE NEWS,” but there are also the classic questions of “boy or girl” and “do u like me,” appearing in comic book–like speech bubbles above the penguin avatars. Many of the penguins that I finally talk to have been playing for years and are furious about losing their progress and their cache of accumulated stuff. Others, who are as semi-naked as I am, have only just rejoined out of nostalgic curiosity. Quite a few of them are probably my age, although it’s hard to be sure, since the game’s strict filter prevents users from using numbers, as a matter of privacy.
That filter has spawned one of the most entertaining, if silly, ways to play Club Penguin over the years, which is to deliberately get yourself banned from the site, usually by using profanity. It even spawned its own subreddit, Banned From Club Penguin, dedicated to all the ways users can get themselves kicked out, which, with the clock ticking, has become a contest to see who can do it the fastest.
Despite the kid-friendly atmosphere, there is a certain subversive quality to modern-day Club Penguin. While some delight in getting banned, others get a thrill from circumventing the filter though creative spelling and wordplay. “Seaweed,” I witness a pink penguin say. “But without the sea.” But it’s not all trolls and bots (and, yes, at least one prostitute). The site was also home to an honest-to-goodness Trump protest back in November, screenshots of which went viral. Sure enough, I still encounter some penguins crying “He will not divide us” at random intervals—with the occasional variation of “Disney will not divide us” as the game’s last hours get closer and closer.
As we near the apocalypse, users are starting to panic like it’s a real apocalypse. There are now fireworks going off all day long, and in the last 24 hours the site has graciously bestowed membership status on every penguin, including us plebes. On the very last day, the mines are empty of workers, since there’s no longer any need to harvest gold. Penguins are dressing up and throwing elaborate, Gatsby-esque parties in their extravagantly furnished igloos and inviting everyone to come. Some are having existential crises. “I’m worried about what will happen to my puffle,” one confesses.
Over in the town square, a number of spambot penguins are hawking a sketchy-sounding Club Penguin knockoff called Virtual Penguin. Others are wailing “SAVE CP!!!,” and in multiple rooms penguins are leading group singalongs—or type-alongs, as the case may be—of Evanescence’s “Bring Me to Life,” which is itself kind of fascinating. But I don’t have time to investigate why an alt-rock song from 2003 has become the unofficial soundtrack of the site’s final hours, because I’m following a lead that something is going down at the iceberg.
Who knows who started the urban legend that if enough penguins stood on one end of the iceberg at the same time, it would tip? That myth was around when I played the game 10 years ago and has persisted for a decade, despite no evidence of its legitimacy. And yet, shortly after Disney announced the site would be shutting down, it really happened: The iceberg tipped, a gift from Club Penguin to its loyal users. I wait around long enough to see it tip this time, revealing a dance floor and speakers on the underside. Penguins cheer, and even in my cold, cynical adult heart, I feel a bit of a thrill.
The site is set to shut down at 12:01 a.m. Pacific time, but not every penguin gets the memo. Three hours before the clock is set to run out, at the snow forts, East Coast penguins are already gathered to say their goodbyes. “Chels are you ready,” a penguin in fairy wings asks her friend. More are yelling, “I’ll miss you all” and “Can’t believe it’s over.” When midnight comes and goes, the confusion and conspiracy theories are immediate, with penguins asking variations of, “Wait, what if it was a trick??”
Screenshot by Marissa Martinelli
Three hours later, as I wait at the Cove with the other penguins for Club Penguin to finally go dark—for real this time—it’s a little sad. Sure, there’s always Disney’s new 3-D mobile game, but it looks more like Toon Town than the game it takes its name from. The original Club Penguin was a weird, fun little corner of the internet that shaped a lot of childhoods. It shaped mine. And surrounded here by dancing penguins in fedoras and samurai costumes, this reporter, for one, is sorry to see it go.
