Carphon has made an interesting (and lengthy!) post about Club Penguin’s beginning, its changes over the years, and the community. I wanted to share it with all the readers of Club Penguin Memories.
I’m not going to repost Carphon’s whole blog post, however, below is just a small excerpt from it. If you’d like to the full post you can view it on his website by clicking here.
Let us waddle back in time, back to 2000. The legacy of Club Penguin started on a sunny day in July of 2000 with “Experimental Penguins”. It was a virtual chatroom developed by Rocketsnail Games as a test for Flash 4. Players would join the game as a blue penguin and chat with other users in snowy rooms, having abilities ranging from driving a snow trekker to wearing a santa hat, It was quite neat for that time! The rooms were quite empty, but they were decorated with objects like a broken down trekker and street posts. There were no chat filters on this MMOG, therefore users had free speech for the time being. The game eventually shut down late that year, though they weren’t exactly done yet. Just before shut down, the game had 2,000 users play it daily. After winning a few amount of awards for the MMOG, Rocketsnail decided to give the game another go, creating the Penguin Chat series.
And another part, this piece from the middle of Carphon’s post:
Going to year 5, the Club Penguin community encountered multiple heart-breaks and plot twists. Two of the most recognizable staff members, Screenhog and rsnail, both left the team to pursue other projects that they’ve had in mind for a while. Though they would tell the community a year later, there was some suspicion. For the happy part of 2010, many parties and events were brought back that were previously discontinued the past 2 years. Along with parties, the PSA was taken down due to a popcorn explosion by Herbert P. Bear. It was time to move on and improve the agency drastically. The explosion happened in the Sports shop and it took down the PSA and the shop itself. The new company was the EPF (Elite Penguin Force),and the shop was transformed into the “Everyday Phoning Facility“, which was basically a portal to the EPF HQ. Now you’d probably ask, “What’s the difference?”. Surely they hold the same idea but I’ll have to go into detail to really show the detail. The original agency was the Penguin Secret Agency (PSA), which had its time from August 22, 2005 until it turned out of commission on May 17, 2010. The original agency, after joining, gave users a chance to go on short missions created by the teams where the user would have to work with their boss and other certain mascot agents to unveil culprits of crimes or just solve crimes in general. They were mostly .SWF file room-to-room type missions, but the EPF would eventually change that in the following years. EPF co-existed with PSA for about 2 years from 2008 to 2010, until Herbert would desimate the sports shop with popcorn, because what else would be better than popcorn? The EPF updated the agents’ phones aswell, and would give them up-to-date messages by Gary, their Technology specialist. The new EPF agency also debuted missions that don’t require step to step .SWFs, and they let users solve them by walking around the island and doing mini games involved with the problem. The leader of both operations would be revealed in 2012 to be Aunt Arctic.
Interested on reading the whole thing? Like I said above, you can click here to read the full post. Carphon would definitely love feedback, so feel free to leave your thoughts in a comment on his blog!
