Kung Fu Panda World

» see kungfupandaworld.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

The person who designed Kung Fu Panda World was Greg Johnson, who made ToeJam & Earl for the Genesis in 1991. He ran a team of six directly and oversaw production by about forty people in Los Angeles. Two and a half years of work and roughly ten million dollars went into a browser game about a panda.

It opened to the public on 12 April 2010, three weeks after a sneak peek on 23 March. You made a character and moved it through a pre-rendered 2D version of the Valley of Peace. The rest was minigames. You could watch advertising to keep playing for nothing or buy a subscription for the parts held back.

DreamWorks let players vote on what got built next, which was unusual for a licensed property in 2010 and is the one decision here worth remembering. A studio that owns a film franchise normally treats the game as merchandise and ships it finished. This one was run closer to a service, with a roadmap that could be argued with.

I was twenty six in 2010 and writing code in Ankara. Nothing about a subscription world for American nine year olds was going to reach me, and the billing alone would have stopped it at the border. Kung Fu Panda played in Turkish cinemas and on Turkish television, dubbed. The website behind it stayed in English on a US card.

~ the case file ~

~ the funny part ~

DreamWorks Animation had watched Disney buy Club Penguin for 350 million dollars in 2007 and drew the obvious conclusion. A film studio with a character children already love can build the world itself and keep the subscription money. That is the reasoning that produced this game, and on paper in 2009 it was sound.

What it missed is that Club Penguin had no film to be secondary to. Children went there because it was the place, not because they liked a movie. A world named after a franchise arrives already explained, and once the panda is explained there is not much left to do inside it except wait for the sequel.

~ what really happened ~

On 15 July 2012 the game was switched off and the address began redirecting to the main Kung Fu Panda site. There was no closure post and no explanation of where the accounts went. Kung Fu Panda 2 had come out the previous May and made money, so the property was healthy. The game simply stopped being part of it.

Running a persistent world costs money every month whether or not a film is in theaters, and DreamWorks Animation spent 2012 cutting. The silence is the part people still complain about. There is a petition to bring it back that nobody ever answered, which is what a shutdown with no reason attached produces. People who cannot tell whether it is over.

~ what got buried with it ~

Nothing survived. The world lived on DreamWorks servers and the client was a browser, so there is no cartridge to dig out and no offline mode to fall back on. What exists now is a small pile of screenshots and some video people recorded while it was running, filed on the lost media wiki with the rest of the browser era.

Greg Johnson went back to his own characters and shipped ToeJam & Earl: Back in the Groove in 2019 off a Kickstarter. That is the ending licensed work does not get. He still owns the part of his career that was his, and the panda part belongs to a redirect.

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