Club Penguin

A generation's first social network, with penguins

Shut down
19902026

Club Penguin was the virtual world where millions of kids of the 2000s first learned to be online, launched from Kelowna, Canada in October 2005 and bought by Disney in 2007 for up to $700 million. Disney shut the original game on 29 March 2017, replacing it with a short-lived mobile successor.

Timeline [edit]

  1. 2005
  2. 24 October 2005 Launch
    Club Penguin opens

    A safe, moderated virtual world for kids.

  3. 2007
  4. 1 August 2007 Acquisition
    Disney buys Club Penguin

    $350M upfront plus $350M in potential earnouts.

  5. 2013
  6. 2013 Peak
    Hundreds of millions of registered penguins

    One of the largest kids' online communities ever.

  7. 2017
  8. 31 January 2017 Shutdown announced
    Closure announced

    The desktop original will give way to Club Penguin Island.

  9. 29 March 2017 Shutdown
    Club Penguin shuts down

    Players hold vigils as the servers go dark.

  10. 2018
  11. 20 December 2018 Incident
    Club Penguin Island shuts too

    The mobile successor lasts twenty months.

The site through time

Browse clubpenguin.com as it was, via the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine:

2005 2007 2009 2011 2013 2015 2017 Full archive →

Ownership [edit]

New Horizon Interactive 2005–2007 Founded Kelowna, British Columbia studio
Disney 2007–2017 Acquisition, $350M Shut the original in 2017, the successor in 2018

Why it shut down [edit]

Official line: Disney closed the original desktop game on 29 March 2017 in favour of the mobile-first Club Penguin Island, which itself shut at the end of 2018.

Our analysis: A Flash-based desktop world could not follow its audience onto phones, and the mobile replacement carried none of the original's community or charm. When Island flopped, the franchise was simply over, and fan-run private servers kept the flame alive against Disney's lawyers.

History [edit]

Waddling into the mainstream

Club Penguin opened on 24 October 2005: a snowy virtual world of cartoon penguins where kids could chat, play minigames, earn coins and decorate igloos. It solved the problem parents cared about (safety, via heavy filtering and moderation) and the ones kids cared about (puffles, parties, secret agent missions). By 2007 it had millions of subscribers paying about $6 a month, one of the internet's first big subscription successes aimed at children.

Disney bought it in August 2007 for $350 million plus another $350 million in earnouts, and under Disney the world kept growing, ultimately registering hundreds of millions of penguins.

Melting

By the mid-2010s the audience had phones, and Club Penguin was a Flash game built for desktop browsers. Rather than port it, Disney built a from-scratch mobile replacement, announced in January 2017 that the original would close, and switched it off on 29 March 2017; communities held in-game vigils as the servers counted down. Club Penguin Island lasted twenty months before Disney shut it too. What survived was the diaspora: fan-run private servers recreated the classic game for millions of nostalgic players, playing whack-a-mole with Disney's copyright lawyers ever since.

Similar projects

Google Stadia The future of gaming, cancelled 2019–2023

Sources [edit]

  1. Club Penguin is shutting down TechCrunch 31 January 2017 [archived]
  2. Disney Shutting Down Club Penguin, Will Relaunch Franchise With New Mobile Game Variety 31 January 2017 [archived]

Last verified: 11 August 2026. Spotted an error? Suggest an edit (corrections with sources are reviewed and applied).