How three developers in Kelowna built a penguin world
Club Penguin started as Penguin Chat, a Flash experiment by Lance Priebe, a developer in Kelowna, British Columbia. Instead of a text box, users got a penguin avatar they could walk around a shared screen.
Priebe rebuilt the idea with Lane Merrifield and Dave Krysko under a company called New Horizon Interactive. The new version was aimed squarely at children: filtered chat, paid human moderators, and no practical way to hand out a phone number. Club Penguin entered public beta on August 22, 2005 and launched on October 24, 2005.
The design was a park rather than a chatroom. Penguins walked between rooms, decorated igloos, played small games for coins, adopted puffles and turned up for parties that ran on fixed dates. A free account covered most of it, and a paid membership bought clothing, furniture and member-only rooms. That split is why parents tolerated it and why kids asked for it. The whole thing ran on Adobe Flash, the plugin browsers finally dropped at the end of 2020.
Why Disney paid $350 million for a two-year-old game
The Walt Disney Company announced the purchase on August 1, 2007: about $350 million in cash, with up to another $350 million payable if Club Penguin hit earnings targets in calendar 2008 and 2009. Coverage at the time put the site at roughly 700,000 paid subscribers and 12 million activated accounts, mostly in the United States and Canada.
Growth continued under Disney. By July 2013 the game had passed 200 million registered accounts, a figure that counts every penguin ever created rather than anyone still logging in.
The second half of the deal never arrived. Disney's Form 10-Q filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission in 2009 recorded that Club Penguin missed its 2008 earnings target, cutting $175 million from the purchase price. The 2009 target went the same way, so the full $350 million earnout lapsed and the founders never saw it. Priebe and Merrifield both left the company in the years that followed.
Why Disney closed the game in 2017
Disney announced the shutdown on January 30, 2017 and set the closing date at March 29, 2017. Memberships stopped selling the next day. The stated reason was a move to mobile: Club Penguin Island, an app-only remake, launched the same week the browser game closed.
People who worked on it describe a different mechanism. Chris Heatherly, the Disney executive who ran Club Penguin, wrote on X in 2024 that when the game was shut down "it was making $30m in revenue a year with a team of 15," and said the business was recorded as losing money only once corporate overhead was assigned to it.
The replacement did not last either. In September 2018 Disney told staff at the Kelowna studio that Club Penguin Island was closing and that they were being laid off, as Variety reported at the time. The servers went off on December 20, 2018, less than two years after launch, and the franchise was left with no official version at all.
Is Club Penguin still playable in 2026?
Not officially. Disney owns the trademark, the art and the code, and has run no Club Penguin service since December 20, 2018. There is no Disney archive, no offline client and no paid legacy server.
What exists instead is a set of unlicensed fan recreations built from the original assets and a reverse-engineered protocol. Club Penguin Legacy, which is free and takes no memberships or donations, passed 1,000,000 registered penguins on November 3, 2025 and was still running scheduled events in September 2026. Club Penguin Journey, released on February 5, 2023 and built to look like the pre-2013 game, passed 1 million registered players in July 2026 and was the most consistently active server on the penguintrack load tracker in June 2026.
None of that is settled legally. Every one of these servers runs on Disney property and survives only until Disney decides otherwise. Readers who followed the other virtual worlds of the era will recognize the contrast with Habbo Hotel and Neopets, which both stayed open under their own owners.
Why the police seized the biggest fan remake
Club Penguin Rewritten launched in 2017, weeks after the original closed, and reported more than 11 million registered accounts by 2022. It was the largest of the recreations and the least discreet about it.
On April 13, 2022 the site went dark and was replaced by a City of London Police seizure notice, following a copyright complaint from Disney. The force's Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit said that "three people were arrested on April 12 on suspicion of distributing materials infringing copyright" and that searches were carried out. The three were released under investigation and signed the website over to police control.
It was not the first action. In 2020 Disney shut down Club Penguin Online, a server that had picked up a large pandemic audience along with serious moderation failures, including racist and sexual content that the operators did not remove. Club Penguin Legacy received a DMCA notice from Disney on January 18, 2023 and closed temporarily on January 24 before returning.
What Lane Merrifield's move to Imagineering means
In May 2026 Lane Merrifield, the co-founder who handled sales and marketing and was known in game as Billybob, posted that he had started a job at Walt Disney Imagineering. "I got lost ten times trying to find my way around the office, but otherwise it was a pretty magical day," he wrote on Instagram, and Disney fan outlets picked the post up within two days.
That is the entire basis for the revival rumors. Merrifield has not said what he is working on, and Disney has announced no Club Penguin project, rerelease or archive. Imagineering designs attractions and physical experiences rather than browser games, so the plainest reading of the job is theme parks, not a server relaunch.
The property is not forgotten inside Disney. The company defended it in 2020, in 2022 and again in 2023, and a company that keeps sending takedown notices is a company that still values the trademark. That is the same reason an official return stays possible and an unofficial one stays fragile.
Frequently Asked Questions
When did Club Penguin shut down?
Disney announced on January 30, 2017 that Club Penguin would close, and the browser and app versions shut down on March 29, 2017, with the servers going quiet in the early hours of March 30. The mobile replacement, Club Penguin Island, launched the same week and shut down on December 20, 2018.
Can you still play Club Penguin in 2026?
There is no official Club Penguin in 2026, because Disney has operated no version of the game since Club Penguin Island closed on December 20, 2018. The game runs only on unlicensed fan servers, among them Club Penguin Legacy, which passed 1,000,000 registered penguins in November 2025, and Club Penguin Journey, which passed 1 million in July 2026. Disney has shut several of these servers down, including Club Penguin Rewritten in April 2022.
How much did Disney pay for Club Penguin?
Disney paid about $350 million in cash for Club Penguin in a deal announced on August 1, 2007, with up to another $350 million tied to earnings targets in 2008 and 2009. Club Penguin missed both targets, so Disney never paid the second half, and the company's 2009 SEC filing recorded a $175 million reduction in the purchase price for the 2008 miss.