If you were a child during 2005-2017, chances are you’ve played or at least heard of Club Penguin. Club Penguin was a massively multiplayer online game, involving a virtual world that contained a range of online games and activities. It was created on October 5th, 2005 by Rocketsnail Games. It was very addictive, fun, and interesting.

At the beginning of the game’s life, it had roughly 3,000 players worldwide. But after only two years of release, Club Penguin was said to be the biggest internet phenomenon of 2007 with over 30 million players. But what causes a game to blow up this quickly? What was there to love about a game where you run around as a penguin and stir up drama with randos? Well, there really isn’t much that we would consider fun nowadays, but back then, the game was groundbreaking. Club Penguin was one of the first-ever games that was strictly online, meaning that you could play with your friends no matter where you were in the world. This was an insane concept for the time, and it got players hooked. Another aspect that people loved was how easy it was to access the game. All you needed to do was download the game on a computer and boom, instant access. The game was pretty simple, you played as a penguin and just did…stuff! You could dress your penguins up, attend gatherings, talk with other penguins, go sledding, and much more. 

 In 2007 Club penguin had a huge change. Disney purchased Club Penguin from Rocketsnail Games for 350 million dollars. Disney saw how popular the game was becoming, and they wanted to take the opportunity. Since Rocketsnail games was a very small company, they were happy to take the money in exchange for Disney to take care of the game from then on. Although at the time this decision seemed like a good idea, it ultimately resulted in the downfall of Club Penguin. The downfall did not happen immediately. In fact, in 2011 Club Penguin reached over 150 million users worldwide. At the beginning, Disney was regularly updating the game to keep things fresh and players interested. However, over time Disney slowly stopped updating the game. Remember how Disney purchased Club Penguin for 350 million dollars? Well, there was more to the deal than just that. The deal offered an additional 350 million if in-game purchase sales met expectations by 2009. Unfortunately, the game failed to meet these expectations due to the subtle decline in popularity.

The game would continue to lose players year by year because Disney had completely stopped updating it. Club Penguin was slowly moving away from the spotlight. On January 30th, 2017, Disney announced that the game would be discontinued on March 29th of that year due to the lack of interest shown by players. Overall, the Club Penguin community was pretty sad when the game was shut down. Many people believe that the game would still be around nowadays if it was never sold to Disney. Either way, Club Penguin had a good life and holds a special place in many people’s childhood memories.