Club Penguin was a popular virtual world for children where they could play games, chat with friends and create their own penguin avatar. The game had been around since 2005 when the cost of membership was just $5 per month. After 12 years in operation, Club Penguin announced that it would be shutting down on March 29th, 2017. In this article, I will talk about my experiences playing Club Penguin as well as what happened to it over the course of its lifetime.
The first time I played Club Penguin was in 2006 when it cost $25 to join for one year. I had just turned 13 and my mother let me play the game because she thought it would be a safe environment where only other kids could see what I looked like online. My penguin avatar’s name was Audrey. It took about 15 minutes of playing before seeing that all you could do at this point without paying money every month (or getting someone else’s login) was chat with friends by typing messages into an open forum window or send them emails that were read aloud as text to others on your island who also received the email but then disappeared from their screen after two days.
I didn’t end up really liking the way chat was set up because it was too easy to misunderstand what someone typed. One time I thought a penguin had said they were “ready,” when in reality, the last word of their sentence that I saw was “read.”
I also remember how there weren’t many items you could buy with coins earned from playing the game unless your parents let you pay them for things like clothing or new furniture for your igloo home.
The most fun part of Club Penguin though were the activities where players cooperated to accomplish something together
usually, tour guide quests where they needed penguins to find and bring back specific objects all around the island (a backpack! A map!) by giving each other clues using emojis in chat until whoever solved it first called out “I found it!”
I remember how excited everyone would get for the annual Penguin Playtime where players got to play games and activities with each other in different themed zones.
This is a blog post that tells about why Club Penguin died, and what happened when it did. It also talks about cool things from CP-like not being able to buy clothing or furniture without paying real-life money until you were an adult; discovering clues together as a group by using emojis in chat then shouting “I found it” once someone figured something out; hosting events like every year’s penguin playtime where people could do fun activities with one another around the island so they weren’t always playing alone; etcetera.
It talks about where you were when CP died, and what it was like. It also goes into detail on how different people would interact with each other in chat rooms or through discords where they could find clues together to solve mysteries or puzzles around the island as a group. !”
The article then explains all of the cool things that Club Penguin did for its players until Disney shut down the game for good back in 2017. The author shares their own personal experience playing Club Penguin from 2005-2016, including being one of those who played every day and never got bored even after over ten years of participation.”!
The last few paragraphs talk about nostalgia and looking back at some memories: “I think I can safely say that if Club Penguin had kept going, I would’ve played for years to come. Not only that, but it would have been a game where kids could play and talk together without feeling like they were being judged. It’s just unfortunate because Club Penguin was my first taste of an online social media before Facebook or Twitter.”
I think this is the perfect article for anyone who has experienced what we lost when Club Penguin died back in 2017″.
In October of 2017, Disney revealed that Club Penguin would be shutting down in March 2018. I still remember being at school on the day when this big news dropped and seeing everyone’s reactions to it; from how devastated they seemed (though admittedly, my own reaction was pretty muted) to those people who started messaging each other furiously with links to download or save their stuff on the game before it disappeared for good.
