Premium Episode 170: Club Penguin (Cursed Communities) Sample
What is a pookie? Jake and Liv inaugurate our first cross-generational exchange with this episode about a mid aughts child MMO bought by Disney — a game with the acronym "CP". Were you one of the penguins? Did you tip the iceberg on that day of reckoning when the servers shut down?
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Episode music by Pontus Berghe. Editing by Corey Klotz.
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Welcome, listener, to Premium Chapter 170 of the QAnon Anonymous Podcast, the Club Penguin episode.
As always, we are your hosts, Jake Rogatansky, Liv Aker, Julian Field, and Travis View.
This week, while I was bravely risking my life and my wife to cover the four-day secret space conference in Grafton, Illinois, some of us were having a great time fooling around with Club Penguin, a video game for babies.
Jake and Liv, who are gamers if you consider Candy Crush a video game, Have taken a moment out of their busy schedules of jacking off and drinking soda to bring us an episode about this melted little online community of Arctic birds that are probably not birds.
Are they birds?
But they're now extinct, so it doesn't matter.
Who cares?
The story of Club Penguin involves the Disney Corporation, 4chan, and millions of children toiling long hours in the digital mines.
So, perfect, and thank you, and take it away, I suppose, or whatever.
This is what we live for.
I would like to say also, I haven't only been jacking off and drinking soda, I've also been playing Elden Ring, which is a very serious video game for very serious gamers.
She's still Maidenless, as she's still playing it.
At Club Penguin, you're a penguin!
But not just any penguin, you're a penguin ninja!
Or a secret agent!
Chat with your friends!
Orgoth exploring, have a race, or pull cool tricks, throw huge parties!
You can even adopt your own pet puffle!
Or maybe just throw a slide in!
There's something new and exciting every week!
You can start exploring this online world for free!
Have fun at clubpenguin.com!
Lance Preeb was a graphic designer working for Rocket Snail Games, an indie gaming publisher he founded based out of Kelowna in British Columbia.
The game was called Ballistic Biscuit, which saw players guiding befuddled camp counselor Bob through raging rapids dodging frogs, rocks, and other obstacles.
Ballistic biscuit sounds like a gay thing that people do at a sleepover.
Oh my god.
Well, it's funny that you say that because the game site states that the game was developed to help promote Green Bay Bible Camp in Kelowna, BC.
Oh no.
So this was made so children had a little interactive software to play with as they learn about our father, Jesus Christ.
But that day, somewhere in July of the year 2000, 22 years ago, Lance did something that would alter the course of his life and online gaming in a massively significant way.
He glanced down at a Far Side cartoon that was sitting on his desk.
The cartoon featured penguins, as Gary Larson's work often did.
He began to develop a game called Snow Blasters.
That also sounds... Another thing that sounds like a gay sleepover.
This is just different gay sleepover activities.
This is just a gay sleepover app.
I hope everybody is cool with that.
Also, are we going to discuss that Jake is calling them penguins?
Like pen... penguin?
Is that... is it penguin or penguin?
It's penguin.
Were you saying penguin?
Penguin?
No, this isn't an online ping.
Am I saying it wrong?
It's penguin.
It's penguin?
It's like the French pronunciation or something.
Is there something wrong with that?
Yeah, Julien has a couple weird things that he pronounces.
He says bin weird.
He says bean.
Like, have you been to Kelowna?
Yeah, I know.
I think it's like ancient remnants of like New Jersey or something when I was seven.
But I do know that Liv is a penguin.
That's true.
So, Snowblasters was built in Flash 4, and the idea was to create a massively online snowball fight featuring hundreds of players on the screen.
There were dozens of items planned that would give players an advantage on the icy battlefield, including a toque that would give players additional armor and a thermos of hot chocolate, which could be used to either heal a player or poured on the ground to reveal enemy positions.
Both of those go back to, like, the chivalrous times in Canada.
That was the only armor they came up with.
You should be able to, like, pack some hardened ice into the snowball for extra damage.
Yeah, I mean, I'm sure that was planned.
It actually sounded like an awesome game.
A game I would still maybe like to see one day.
Yeah, if they have snowballs, I'm sure the internet will put rocks at the core of them.
The game never released, but rather morphed into what would become the very beginnings of Club Penguin, an MMO for young kids intended to introduce children safely to the world of online communities.
The first iteration was known as Experimental Penguins.
It was super simple.
Players could give their penguin a name and speak to one another via a chat field that then displayed a text bubble emanating from their cute little digital birds.
There were four rooms to explore and that was it.
Lance was surprised at how popular it was.
People loved the idea of a chat room that had avatars and graphics.
The game was released for free online and became so popular that it eventually had to be shut down a year later due to increased server costs.
Lance went back to work on his magnum opus, Snow Blasters, but the damage was already done.
Companies had become aware of the popularity of experimental penguins and asked Lance to create chat worlds for their own websites.
In 2001, I started working on my multiplayer strategy game, Snow Blasters, again.
This was quickly interrupted when companies started asking me to develop character chats for their websites.
After building a couple custom chats, I decided to build the next version of Experimental Penguins called Penguin Chat.
In January 2003, the new and improved Penguin Chat went online.
This version included lots of new features like emotes, chat balloons, depth sorting, you could walk behind an object, and the ability to throw snowballs.
By 2004, more than 1 million penguins had waddled around.
Penguin Chat went through a couple more iterations.
The graphics were way more advanced than Experimental Penguins.
After creating a character, players were dumped into a kitschy-looking town square with three storefronts.
A coffee shop, a gift shop, and a nightclub.
Areas that Club Penguin players will no doubt recognize.
Lance, along with his two collaborators, Lane Merrifield and Dave Crisco, began adding mini-games to Penguin Chat to give players more to do in the world.
Ballistic Biscuit, their Bible Camp game, was re-engineered into Hydro Hopper.
Players could also play a digital version of Mancala, a game where you moved colored stones along a slotted wooden game board.
Have any of you guys played that?
I know about it.
I've seen the long kind of wooden things with the little, like, bowls in them.
Yeah, with the little gems in it.
Yeah.
With the influx of users by the end of 2004, Lance and his team began to develop the idea for Club Penguin.
The developers' own children were at the age where they were starting to become interested in computer games, and the guys looked for something already online that was geared towards kids.
Safe, no advertisements, with light social elements.
Turns out, there was nothing.
And so, With the Penguin Chat prototype already up and running, Rocketsnail made the decision to implement what would become Club Penguin, hidden within Penguin Chat 3, the current build of the game.
Running out of money and bandwidth, and having spent weeks designing Halloween-themed items, the team made the decision to push the update on October 24th of 2005.
I was graduate- I was graduate college that year, so, it's crazy.
I was seven.
Liv was seven.
I was failing my last semester because I didn't attend any of my classes.
And I believe Travis was a dad.
Oh god.
Uh, yeah.
That's amazing.
He nods.
He nods begrudgingly.
The reason that the game was retitled Club Penguin?
Well, the domain name was available.
So they went online and they looked for a bunch of, you know, they were looking for a bunch of stuff.
Penguin World was taken, a bunch of other stuff was taken.
So Club Penguin, which is now, you know, iconic, sort of, in the archives of online gaming history.
It was just a fluke.
And unfortunately, it yielded the acronym CP.
Yes.
Which is not insignificant, as we'll come to discover.
Club Penguin started out with about 15,000 users.
By March of the next year, that number was 1.4 million.
By September, just a couple months later, 2.6 million users.
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