DEEP DIVE

The formerly defunct online interactive penguin role-playing geared towards children, Club Penguin is back. Multiple functional unofficial replicas of the game are available for online gameplay.

What Is Club Penguin?

Club Penguin (CP) is an online multiplayer penguin virtual world. In CP, penguin avatars can waddle through a cartoon town, chat with other penguins, and play a number of different minigames. Originally owned by MiniClip, Club Penguin was acquired by Disney in 2007 and shut down in 2017.

Is Club Penguin Back?

For all intents and purposes, CP is back via private servers including  Club Penguin Rewritten, Penguin World, and Club Penguin Online, free-to-play virtual worlds based on Disney’s previous version of the game.

CP Rewritten has been active since January 2019. A legal disclaimer on their website explains that it’s “a non-profit re-creation of Disney’s Club Penguin created for educational purposes.”Penguin World is a “non-profit re-creation of Disney’s Club Penguin created for educational purposes by teenagers.” CP Online was created in January 2018 and claims to be “the largest CPPS with over 3,000,000 registered users.” The legality of these websites is not completely clear. They claim to be in fair use because they exist for “educational purposes,” but the extent to which their use is “educational” is debatable.

The game is particularly attractive to teenagers and young adults who played the original game when they were younger. As it’s 2019, penguins can be found role-playing in these virtual worlds, discussing KPOP standoms, acting like VSCO girls, and debating whether Fortnite is cooler than Minecraft.

On August 28, 2019, YouTuber LazarBeam posted a video of him playing and trolling on a recreated CP server. This video received over 2 million views and was featured as #2 on YouTube’s trending list, drawing significant attention to the fact that there’s currently a playable version of CP accessible online.

How To Play

CP Rewritten and Penguin World are replicas of an older version of the game while CP Online resembles the most recent version before the site was shut down. These games look and function almost exactly the same as the original game world. Newbies and users of the original game will have to create a new account in order to play. Flash Player must be enabled to use these sites.

It seems that these unofficial versions have less vigilant moderation policies than the original game did. Although there are processes to report users who do or say inappropriate things, some usernames, conversations, and behavior in these new CP servers are not kid-friendly and may contain offensive or inappropriate content.

CP Rewritten’s privacy policy can be found here. Penguin World’s privacy policy is laid out on their website. CP Online does not appear to have an official privacy policy but more information can be found on their Discord page. It’s not clear how the safety and privacy policies of these sites compare to the original version of the game. Caution should be exercised especially when minors are playing since these are unofficial versions hosted on private servers.

More overall information and reviews can be found on the subreddit r/ClubPenguin, which is dedicated to fans of the game.