What happened to Club Penguin?

By Obscure Internet 17 Oct 2026 8 min read

Club Penguin’s last day was 29 March 2017, and its servers went off just after midnight. Disney, which had bought the game ten years earlier, switched off the original Flash world to make way for a mobile app called Club Penguin Island, and that lasted less than two years before it closed too, on 20 December 2018.

That’s the short answer. The longer one involves a Canadian hobby project, a pet made of fluff, one of the most talked-about deals of the virtual-world boom, and a great many people who now have mortgages and still remember exactly how to get to the Pizza Parlor.

EXHIBIT

What was Club Penguin?

Club Penguin was a free browser game where you were a small round penguin in a snowy town. You picked a colour, a name and, if you were lucky, a hat. Then you waddled about, chatted, threw snowballs, played mini-games for coins and spent those coins on clothes for yourself and furniture for your igloo.

From the museum

It ran in Flash, so there was “nothing to download”, as the homepage promised in 2005. That mattered. A whole generation played it on the family computer, on the library computer and, famously, on the school computer when the teacher wasn’t looking.

The town had rooms you could still draw from memory: the Town Centre, the Coffee Shop, the Night Club, the Ski Village, the Dock and the Pizza Parlor. There were monthly parties, with a free item at most of them. There were famous penguins controlled by staff, such as the pirate Rockhopper, the inventor Gary the Gadget Guy and the newspaper editor Aunt Arctic, and spotting one was the playground news of the week.

And there were puffles: round, furry pets in different colours that followed you about and needed feeding and playing with. Neglect one for too long and it ran away, which taught a great many children about responsibility the hard way.

Who made Club Penguin?

Club Penguin was made in Kelowna, British Columbia, by a small company called New Horizon Interactive. Its founders were Lance Priebe, Lane Merrifield and Dave Krysko.

The idea started much earlier, as Priebe’s hobby. In his own account, he had the idea for a multiplayer penguin game in the winter of 1999 and launched a small experiment called Experimental Penguins in July 2000. It closed a year later because he was paying the server bills himself. He tried again with Penguin Chat in January 2003, which he later described as a quiet test of the server and client “for something much bigger”.

Priebe was working part-time for Krysko at the time. In 2004 Krysko hired Merrifield, who saw Penguin Chat and pushed for the project to be fast-tracked. Club Penguin went live on 24 October 2005. “There was no marketing budget,” Priebe wrote. “No launch strategy.”

Priebe’s summary of the three founders is a good one: “Dave built a company, Lane built a business, and I built the product.”

Why was Club Penguin so popular?

Part of the answer is timing. In 2005 almost every computer had Flash, and portal sites put free games in front of millions of children every day. In March 2006 Club Penguin launched on Miniclip, and Priebe says it quickly became the site’s number one game. By then it had passed a million penguins, and he rebuilt the game three times that year to keep up.

The other part is that parents trusted it. The 2005 homepage led with “Kid Safe-Chat”, and the game was built around it. There was an Ultimate Safe Chat mode where you could only pick phrases from a menu, a filter that blocked swearing and phone numbers, and a large team of human moderators. Breaking the rules could get you banned, from a day to forever. Children found endless creative ways around the filter, but the parents paying for it found little to worry about.

That leads to the third part: membership. You could play free, but members got the good stuff: buying clothes, decorating a bigger igloo, more puffles and the members-only rooms at parties. In 2007 it cost $5.95 a month, and the playground divide between members and non-members was very real. Free players could put together an outfit from party giveaways, but if your penguin wore the latest catalogue clothes, you had parents who had been persuaded.

EXHIBIT

How much did Disney pay for Club Penguin?

On 1 August 2007, Disney bought Club Penguin for $350 million in cash, plus up to another $350 million if the game hit profit targets. With the bonus, the deal was worth up to $700 million, and that’s the figure most headlines used.

At the time, Disney said the game had more than 700,000 paying subscribers and more than 12 million activated users, mostly in the US and Canada, and Priebe says the team had grown past 100 employees. Merrifield told Disney’s announcement that they had set out to make “a unique place online that we would be comfortable letting our own children visit”. The founders had financed it themselves, with no investors, so the three of them still owned the whole company when Disney came calling.

The second $350 million never arrived. In May 2010, Game Developer reported a New York Times story that Club Penguin had missed both profit targets, so Disney didn’t have to pay the bonus. Merrifield blamed the economic downturn and a faster-than-planned expansion overseas, and he sounded fairly relaxed about it: “We knew from the beginning that we may never see that back half.”

Life under Disney didn’t feel much different from the inside of an igloo. The original team kept building the game. The parties grew bigger and began to feature Disney films and Marvel. Toys appeared in shops. A Disney News button turned up on the homepage within days of the sale.

EXHIBIT

Why did Club Penguin shut down?

Disney’s official reason was that it had built a whole new mobile platform for Club Penguin Island and needed to retire the old system, which had run the game for more than a decade.

The unofficial reasons are easy to see. The children who grew up on Club Penguin had grown up, and the next ones had tablets and phones, most of which couldn’t run Flash. A Club Penguin app helped, but the game was still a Flash game at heart. Players were drifting away: in April 2015, Disney cut staff at the Kelowna studio as the game’s popularity declined. Flash itself was on its way out across the whole web. Rather than port the old game, Disney decided to start again.

The announcement came on 30 January 2017. Memberships stopped being sold the next day, and members stopped being charged. The game would close on 29 March 2017. Club Penguin had registered more than 200 million accounts over its life.

What happened on the last day?

Club Penguin went out with a farewell party called “Waddle On”. On the final night, players crowded into the game to say goodbye, filling the chat with countdowns and farewells until the servers went quiet. Massively Overpowered counted the game’s life at 4,174 days.

For a lot of people in their twenties, it was one of the first times something from their childhood was switched off in public, with everyone watching.

What happened to Club Penguin Island?

Club Penguin Island launched worldwide as the old game closed, at the end of March 2017. It was a 3D game for phones and tablets, built in Unity instead of Flash. Your old penguin, coins and igloo didn’t come with you.

It didn’t take off. Reviews were mixed, and many old players disliked it for missing features they loved and for offering too little to people who didn’t pay. A desktop version arrived in November 2017, but it wasn’t enough. In September 2018 Disney said the game would close by the end of the year, and the studio in Kelowna was hit by layoffs. A Disney letter to staff cited increased global competition.

The servers went off at 10am Pacific time on 20 December 2018. An offline mode was left behind in the final update, so the last players could walk around a world with nobody else in it, which is a quietly sad way for a social game to end.

Can you still play Club Penguin?

Not officially. Disney hasn’t brought Club Penguin back.

Fans have run their own copies for years, built from the old game files. Disney doesn’t like that, because those files are its copyright. In 2020 the long-running fan server Club Penguin Online was taken down, and in April 2022 the biggest one, Club Penguin Rewritten, closed after a copyright investigation. Others have come and gone since. They’re unofficial, their moderation is only as good as whoever happens to run them, and they can disappear overnight.

Hope never quite leaves. In May 2026, Lane Merrifield posted on Instagram about his first day at Walt Disney Imagineering, and fans immediately wondered whether the penguins were coming home. Nothing has been announced, and when the news broke he gave no hint of what his new job involves.

Club Penguin: a timeline

• July 2000: Lance Priebe launches Experimental Penguins, the hobby game that started it all.
• January 2003: Penguin Chat opens, quietly testing the technology for something bigger.
• 24 October 2005: Club Penguin goes live.
• March 2006: Club Penguin launches on Miniclip and passes a million penguins.
• 1 August 2007: Disney buys the game for $350 million, with up to $350 million more promised.
• May 2010: Reports say the profit targets were missed, so the second $350 million is never paid.
• April 2015: Disney cuts staff at the Kelowna studio as the game declines.
• 30 January 2017: Disney announces the closure.
• 29 March 2017: The last day of Club Penguin. Club Penguin Island takes over.
• 20 December 2018: Club Penguin Island’s servers are switched off.
• April 2022: Club Penguin Rewritten, the biggest fan copy, is shut down.

More from the same era waits in The Playground Years.

From the museum