Club Penguin Rewritten

» see cprewritten.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

I have never made a penguin. In 2017 I was thirty-three and the part of the internet I grew up on was already something people wrote retrospectives about. But I know the impulse behind this one from the other end of it, because the Ultima Online I played in Turkey was mostly private servers, run by people who had rebuilt something a company owned and were letting strangers in for free. That is exactly what Club Penguin Rewritten was, with a snow map instead of Britannia.

Disney bought Club Penguin in 2007 for up to seven hundred million dollars and killed it on 29 March 2017, after roughly two hundred million accounts had been created on it. The announcement came in January. Club Penguin Rewritten opened on 12 February, six weeks before the original went dark, built by two developers who went by Codey and Hagrid and who were young enough to be nostalgic for a game that had been running while they were at school.

It grew the way nothing built by two people is supposed to grow. A hundred thousand accounts by April 2017 and a million by that October. Eight million by late 2020. When the pandemic put every child in the world indoors, thirty thousand new penguins were registering a day, and by the end the total was past eleven million. Disney's official replacement, Club Penguin Island, had closed in December 2018 after eighteen months.

~ the record ~

~ what they actually rebuilt ~

The pitch was not a tribute or a spiritual successor. It was the game, reconstructed close enough that a player returning after five years could not tell which one they were in. The igloos worked and the puffles worked, and the parties still ran on a calendar. Then the team started writing new content on top, which is where a preservation project turns into a competing product.

Running it cost real money, and in January 2018 the cost showed up in a different form. Somebody got into the database through a backdoored admin account and walked out with 1,688,176 email addresses along with the usernames and bcrypt hashes attached to them. The breach did not become public knowledge until Have I Been Pwned listed it more than a year later, in April 2019. A children's game with two administrators and no company behind it had been carrying the security burden of a service with millions of users.

~ the day the police came ~

Disney had been circling since April 2020, sending takedown requests to Google over the search listings. What probably ended the ambiguity was money: as hosting bills climbed the team put advertising on the site, and a fan project with an ad network attached stops looking like fandom in a lawyer's reading of it.

On 12 April 2022 three people were arrested on suspicion of distributing material infringing copyright, and searches were carried out. They were released under investigation and signed the domain over. The next day anybody loading cprewritten.net got a black page with the City of London Police crest and a line about Operation Creative, run by the Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit. An administrator posted that the game was shutting down effective immediately at the full request of Disney. Detective Constable Daryl Fryatt confirmed the seizure. Disney had done the same thing to a different remake, Club Penguin Online, in 2020.

~ what got buried with it ~

The strange fact at the center of this is that the copy was more alive than the original ever was at the end. Disney closed Club Penguin because engagement was falling, then watched an unpaid reconstruction of it pull eleven million signups in five years. Whatever the audience wanted, the rights holder had stopped being able to give it to them, and then made sure nobody else could either.

Other remakes are still running, quieter and careful about ads. The players who learned in 2022 that a childhood game can be taken off the internet by a police unit have that as a formative memory now, which is a considerably stranger thing to carry than the game itself was.

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