Club Penguin

About Club Penguin

Club Penguin is an online game developed by New Horizon Interactive, which has since been purchased by The Walt Disney Company. Using cartoon penguins as avatars, players waddle around, chat, play minigames, and participate in other activities with one another in a snow-covered virtual world. After beta-testing, Club Penguin was made available to the general public on October 24, 2005 and has since expanded into a large online community. In April 2008, Club Penguin opened its first international office in the UK for local support.

Development on Club Penguin began in 2003 when Lance Priebe and Lane Merrifield, employees at New Horizon Productions (which became New Horizon Interactive in 2005) in Kelowna, British Columbia, saw a need for "social networking for kids". As Merrifield later described the situation, they decided to build Club Penguin when they were unsuccessful in finding "something that had some social components but was safe, and not just marketed as safe" for their own children. Merrifield and Priebe approached their employer, David Krisko, with the idea of creating a spinoff company to develop the new product.

Prior to starting work on Club Penguin, Lance Priebe had been developing Flash web-based games in his spare time. As part of Rocketsnail Games, Priebe released Experimental Penguins in 2000, which featured gameplay similar to that which was incorporated into Club Penguin. Although Experimental Penguins went offline in 2001, it was used as the inspiration for Penguin Chat, which was released shortly after Experimental Penguin's removal. Thus, when Priebe, Merrifield and Krisko decided to go ahead with Club Penguin in 2003, they had Penguin Chat to inform part of the design process. After two years of testing and development, the first version of Club Penguin went live on October 24, 2005..