Meet the ‘Club Penguin’ superfans giving the game a second life

For many tweens of the 2000s, Club Penguin was the place to be. Players created penguin avatars, dressed them up, and roamed a virtual world of igloos, ski lodges, and mini-games. There were puffles, Tamagotchi-like pets to care for, and bustling servers where you could chat with friends, surf through a mine, or lob a virtual snowball at a stranger. At its peak, the game drew hundreds of millions of users and offered an early taste of social media for a generation of kids. Disaster struck in 2017, when Disney, which owned the platform, shut it down, citing declining popularity and falling revenue. The company pointed users to a new game, Club Penguin Island, but that, too, was discontinued soon after. Since then, several attempts have been made to revive the Antarctic metaverse. Club Penguin Online was eventually overrun with racist and antisemitic content, while the unsanctioned Club Penguin Rewritten surged during the pandemic before being taken offline, leading to arrests in London.