Once a week in elementary school, we’d leave our classrooms and walk over to the computer lab for computer class. Our teacher would dash around the rows and rows of squircly white iMac G5’s, frantically trying to get us to follow the instructions instead of clone stamping a million cows in Kid Pix.
In 3rd grade, our computer teacher decided to open up the computer lab during recess time. My friends and I immediately ran over to check it out— playing outside was great and all, but battling each other over Typeracer and Crazy Taxi was even better.
Nearly every website was blocked, but by some miracle Cool Math Games wasn’t. If you were a kid with internet access in the early 2000’s, you might know where this is going.
Despite efforts to present itself as an educational website, most games on Cool Math Games had no educational value, which was absolutely fantastic for a bunch of 3rd graders with a 20 minute break to kill. For example, my favorite game on the site was Bloons Tower Defense 3, which involved recruiting monkeys to throw darts at balloons.
Back then the Internet was still coming out of its Wild West phase. Every click on Cool Math Games took us to a wacky new flash game. I’d get dragged into magical duels on Wizard101, build Omega sleds in Learn To Fly 2, and conduct diamond heists with Henry Stickmin.
But there was one particular game that stood above them all, in such magnificent glory that I still think about it at least once a week over 10 years later.
Here is the (very abbreviated) history of Club Penguin, why it’s so important to me, and some lessons we could learn from it.
The Origins of Club Penguin
In 1999, Lance Priebe, a little-known game developer from Canada, had an ambitious goal: make a massively online multiplayer snowball fight game ↗. He only had one problem: in the rising era of flash games, he didn’t know how to make a flash game.
Lance decided to start small and see what he could do. A year later, he launched Experimental Penguins ↗, a simple chat world where players could waddle around as penguins and text each other messages.
Surprisingly, there was quite a large demand for pretending to be a penguin while talking with people online. In just one month, 25,000 people visited the site, and suddenly something beautiful was born.
Lance went through a few more iterations of what was now known as Penguin Chat before he was ready for something even bigger.
Lance got his co-worker Lane Merrifield ↗ on board, and together they pitched the idea to their boss at the time, Dave Krysko. Dave loved the idea so much, he essentially donated part of their company towards development.
To minor fanfare, Club Penguin opened its doors to the public on October 24, 2005, five years ahead of schedule.
a lore for all ages
Most people don’t realize Club Penguin launched incomplete. Why is there a Dojo? How do you become a ninja? Why is there a light house? Why is there a pet shop? Can you tip the iceberg?
—Lance Priebe, experimenting with penguins ↗
Many MMORPG’s have a lore so deep that it would take years just to get caught up. Since Club Penguin was designed for kids, it needed to be way more approachable.
You’re a penguin. There are floofy things called puffles that you can keep as pets. You can go become a secret agent if you really want to go deep, but if not there’s a perfectly acceptable Everyday Phoning Facility for all your calling needs. You don’t need to know the 400-year history of elven sorcery to optimize your attack patterns in Card-Jitsu.
Every week, the developers published an in-game newspaper, which offered some flavor text, event notices, and mini-tutorials amid user-submitted jokes and an advice column hosted by Aunt Arctic. Going back through the archives, I realize that each issue is fairly independent— a brand new player could crack open the paper and understand pretty much everything, plus know what special events they could look forward to that week.
Getting your joke or art submission onto the paper immediately meant internet stardom. The entire community would see your username and the thing you spent hours crafting meticulously. I’d be very unsurprised if a popular social media influencer debuted on the Club Penguin Times.
crazy good engineering
One of our core beliefs was around not advertising to young kids…really the whole goal was to try and give kids a safe walled environment that was ad free, ‘cause that’s what we wanted for our own kids.
—Lane Merrifield, Club Penguin co-founder
In a recent interview, Lane goes into great detail about the early challenges they faced while scaling operations from a few guys making a funny penguin game into an experience for millions of users.
Echoing his cofounder Lance, ↗ they boil down into three main problems:
-
Building servers that could support a huge amount of people at once
-
Making enough money to run the expensive servers
-
Ensuring the users (i.e. younger kids) were safe and happy
From a technical perspective, Club Penguin should not have been able to exist. Running such a massive game with that small of a team would be a miracle today even with modern cloud infrastructure and an AI SaaS platform for every modicum of need. But this was 2005, and so they had to:
-
Figure out subscription-based online payment processing before Stripe existed
-
Achieve millisecond-level latencies from a web client before the websocket protocol existed
-
Support thousands of concurrent users from around the world by hacking static web servers, before AWS existed
The engineering problem at hand was so immense that they had to hire consultants from IBM, who then refused to solve it because they deemed it too hard.
How did they do it?
As Lane puts it, not all technical problems can or should be solved by technology. Instead of hiring an army of software engineers to achieve 99.999% reliability, they could just let it crash and the community would understand because they trusted and empathized with the team.
Everything was done to support the kids on Club Penguin. If they didn’t care about something, then it didn’t matter. 8-year-olds don’t care about the number of 9’s you have in your SLA, but they will kindly understand if Herbert P. Bear tipped the iceberg yesterday and now someone has to stay up all night to clean up the mess.
One thing that really stuck out to me was their adamance towards not running ads and collecting user data. Even though this was the easiest way for them to make a profit, it went completely against their philosophy. And so, in a rare win against the ad economy, there was never a single ad on Club Penguin in its entire history.
the mouse enters the scene
Lance’s decade-long obsession with penguins and Lane’s single-minded mission towards serving the citizens of Club Penguin paid off big-time.
In two short years, the co-founders fought their way from quitting their jobs with nothing to a $350 million Disney acquisition.
This post could easily turn into some generic corporate-growth-success-story-case-study, so I’ll leave it as a thought to ponder for now: no VC funding, no Silicon Valley talent, no multimillion-dollar social media campaign. Just a good idea made by nice people who had a clear goal and did what they could to achieve it.
The Fall of Club Penguin
(On March 30, 2017 at 12:01am, Club Penguin permanently shut down its servers.
(This was a pretty expected announcement. Club Penguin’s popularity didn’t survive the new decade, and it was about time to move on. Personally, I had stopped playing for many years and barely registered that the shutdown had even happened.
Disney tried resurrecting the franchise as a mobile game called Club Penguin Island , but it was received poorly and shut down after less than two years.
In the meantime, a fan-made recreation called Club Penguin Rewritten took over the reins, gaining millions of users (many hungry for nostalgia) before shutting down in response to the inevitable Disney copyright claim.
These days, New Club Penguin and Club Penguin Legacy are still up and playable if you are looking to explore a world from the past.
A Sunbeam in the Dark Forest
Today, the social internet is a very different (and much scarier) place.
In a nod to Liu Cixin’s Three Body Problem , Yancey Strickler theorized that the Internet has become dark forest ↗: even though there’s clearly people out there, we hide, lurk, and stay quiet so we don’t attract the Russian bots, shameless data sellers, and rage baiters waiting their turn to pounce.
It’s no surprise that most people don’t bother with social media anymore. We stay inside our bubbles of the cozy web ↗, keeping our digital lives within the recognizable confines of Discord DM’s, group chats, and private Instagram accounts.
In a way, this regression reminds me of a generational shift in American childhood: for a long time, it was pretty safe and OK for kids to go outside and play on their own. Now, it’s dangerous and socially unacceptable.
There are a lot of things that the modern internet is really good at. It’s reliable, fast, available to billions of users, and can connect us to pretty much anyone in a moment’s notice. But as so many of us are pointing out, there’s a certain charm and coziness of the old internet that we’ve lost in the process.
Maybe we can learn a thing or two from Club Penguin, and work towards a future where the internet is a friendly, safe place to be— even for kids— where we can go have some snowball fights with friends during our lunch breaks.
That’s all for now! See you all next week, where I explore a certain celestial phenomenon and some related thoughts on humanity.
Thanks for reading whimsical wednesdays! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
Subscribe
further reading
-
A short history of Club Penguin, written by Lance: https://rocketsnail.com/clubpenguin ↗
-
RocketSnail launched a Substack a few months ago. There is nothing there yet… but maybe we should all go subscribe 👀 https://rocketsnail.substack.com ↗
-
The full interview with Lane Merrifield: youtube ↗
-
A full archive of the Club Penguin Times: https://clubpenguin.fandom.com/wiki/Category:Club_Penguin_Times_issues ↗