Club Penguin Rewritten

Gameplay and development

Club Penguin Rewritten was a fan-made copy of Club Penguin, the online multiplayer game originally created by New Horizon Interactive and later bought by Disney in 2007. It kept many of the original features, including a moderation team and a chat filter. Its biggest draw was that it had no paid membership, so players could get any item in the game without spending money. The game recreated older versions of Club Penguin, which the community called "AS2." According to a report from the New Statesman, Rewritten had fewer restrictions, older gameplay mechanics, and servers that could handle up to two million players at once. The project was built by volunteers who were fans of the original game. Two semi-anonymous developers, known as Codey and Hagrid, led the effort. They were students living in the European Union when they started. Both had experience from their own earlier projects, and they offered Rewritten as freeware. They worked without Disney’s permission, and one of their main goals was to preserve Club Penguin. They built the game by restoring the original Flash source code. After Club Penguin shut down on March 30, 2017, Rewritten gained more attention and media coverage. At that time, the development team claimed the game was protected under fair use laws in the United States. A disclaimer on Rewritten’s legal page called it an "independent recreation of Disney's Club Penguin" and said it was "not affiliated with Disney Interactive or Club Penguin Inc." After the original game closed, the Rewritten team grew and started offering email support and moderation services. In a written response to the New Statesman shared on Twitter, the developers said they wanted the game to be fun, safe, and appealing to nostalgic players or anyone looking to connect with others around the world. To do this, they aimed to keep the experience "as authentic as possible" while adding new features to keep people interested.

Release and reception

Club Penguin Rewritten first appeared on February 12, 2017. During the COVID-19 pandemic, it gained a wave of new players, with New York describing the community as a "thriving fandom." The game attracted teens and young adults who had played the original Club Penguin, using the remake as a form of escape from the pandemic. To capitalize on its growing user base, Rewritten organized virtual versions of real-world events like proms and graduation ceremonies that had been canceled due to the pandemic. According to The Hollywood Reporter, most players were high school and college students, with the majority living in the United States. The game hit 100,000 registered users in April 2020 and reached one million by October 4 of that year.

Kotaku called Rewritten the most popular private server—a term for fan-made recreations of Club Penguin—and noted its active speedrunning community. Its popularity rose partly because other private servers shut down, including Club Penguin Online in 2020. On April 3, 2020, singer-songwriter Soccer Mommy performed a virtual concert for her album Color Theory inside the game, part of a broader trend of musical performances in video games sparked by the pandemic. Allison, the artist, explained that Club Penguin was a game everyone remembered from childhood, and she felt many people were doing the same thing she was: logging back in while stuck at home, playing just for fun.

Lance Priebe, an original Club Penguin developer, praised Rewritten in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter for how it used communication tools during the pandemic. A Rewritten staff member said in March 2020 that the game was seeing 30,000 new users each day. The developers described the game's culture as a mix of social media trends like Vine and classic in-game activities such as "tipping the iceberg." In April 2020, Disney sent a DMCA notice to Google, claiming the Club Penguin Rewritten domain infringed on its trademark. A second notice followed a month later, but Google did not respond or act on either request. By the end of 2020, Rewritten was estimated to have eight million registered users.

Shutdown

On April 13, 2022, the City of London Police took Club Penguin Rewritten offline. The site’s homepage was replaced with a notice stating that Operation Creative, part of the Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit (PIPCU), had taken control. A moderator known as Thorn announced on the game’s official Discord server that the shutdown was immediate and came at Disney’s request. The game was under investigation for copyright infringement after its developers handed the website over to law enforcement. Detective Constable Daryl Fryatt of the PIPCU reported that three people connected to the game were arrested on April 12, 2022, on suspicion of distributing copyrighted material. Two days later, they were released to help with the ongoing investigation.

At the time of its closure, Rewritten had more than 11 million registered users and 140,000 members on its Discord server. According to Slate, other unofficial Club Penguin servers saw a rise in sign-ups after the shutdown. Some players pointed out that Rewritten had briefly run ads in exchange for in-game items. Moderator BigChun confirmed that advertising had been introduced in mid-2020, explaining that operating the game required money. Lane Merrifield, a co-founder of the original Club Penguin, wrote on Twitter that Disney’s approach to intellectual property harmed the community rather than protecting it. Another co-founder, Lance Priebe, praised the community Rewritten had built but voiced worries about child safety on private servers. American streamer Ludwig Ahgren called the shutdown excessive for a children’s game, describing it as overkill.