That took FOREVER. My son when he was 7 thought it was the greatest thing ever. I bought him one month and then I never allowed him to spend a dime on it. It was really not a quality product. There were better games and more social things then that site.
My daughter too, she got heavily into the kids' MMOs for a while there (Moshi Monsters, Bin Weevils).
(The business model for these things is: hook the kids with the free version, get them to nag their parents to buy membership.)
Now she's into Pixelmon, a Pokemon-themed Minecraft mod, and various servers running it ;-D It's apparently in Technic Launcher, which will save you approximately forever downloading and setting up the precise version of the mod with the precise version of Minecraft.
It's accurate, but probably not good. Most of the articles on HN that talk about a shut down are about the company going under. That doesn't seem to be the case here.
Regardless of it's right or wrong to assume the content of a post based on its title, a much better title would make it clear the game is shutting down and not the company.
Great if you know that "Club Penguin" has any thing to do with Disney. Personally, I've never heard of it before (nor did I linger on the article long enough to find that out about any association with Disney). Given the start up community's penchant for... unorthodox... company names, for me it could have been an 'Uber' for dry cleaning for as much as I could glean from the title (Uber for dry cleaning... hey.... never mind).
Again: completely accurate title, not as informative as it could be to anyone not already in the know.
"Club Penguin" is not shutting down. It's moving to an updated, mobile-only platform. There is still a thing that bears the Club Penguin name and theme, run by the people who run Club Penguin, onto which, presumably, the majority of Club Penguin's current userbase will migrate. From my reading, some types of memberships will even carry over onto the new platform.
This is a major release that drops support for desktop platforms. So it's certainly a substantial change, but it's not fair to call it a shutdown.
If anything, the market for this type of game is only growing as mobile devices become a ubiquitous part of first-world childhoods. It would make no sense for a successful platform like Club Penguin to abandon that market, especially considering the vertical integration opportunities it provides to its parent company.
For people who is wondering what it is..
"Club Penguin is a massively multiplayer online game (MMO) involving a virtual world containing a range of online games and activities,"
It was also a known gateway for terrorists, and terrorist recruiting cells. The relative obscurity of the game and the assumed anonymity made it a breeding ground for black market crimes.
Club Penguin was a frequent target for 4chan and reddit trolls, similar to Habbo Hotel (see: the Pool's Closed meme and /r/bannedfromclubpenguin on reddit)
It also reminds me of "Pantou the dog" [0] from Brass Eye [1] (created by the same person as Four Lions), which successfully duped several British celebrities and politicians. That particular episode caused media hysteria when it came out.
I remember that article. While they explicitly did call out Club Penguin (in your typical click bait fashion), they admitted in the article that the potential for semi-anonymous communication applied to every online video game and forum on the internet. Club Penguin was also not the only platform targeted with these insinuations - the PS4 was also directly accused of being such a communication method.
Of course, terrorists were also confirmed to be using mail, telephones, text messages, email, and face to face conversations...
Let's be honest, it was a click bait article with no real substance to it.
My daughter used to love Club Penguin. This story gave me a bit of a nostalgia hit. Especially the image of the final party town centre with the big two-penguin picture.
In my experience kids love Garry's Mod if they have the patience to learn it. My brother played the heck out of it when he was 13. (To answer your question, he was playing custom game modes and would sometimes use the character poser/scene creation tools). It's great for technically inclined kids who love sandboxes and are bored with Minecraft.
He's been playing for 5 years now, so he's a mod on a few servers. He started out building simple things, then progressed to wiremod within a couple of weeks. It wasn't long before I couldn't keep up with him when I tried to check out what he was building. He used to build cars/vehicles (mostly from scratch, not using car models) and add them to the workshop, think he has a couple dozen in there. Now he mostly camps on servers and chats with friends (online friends), warns and kicks players when he gets reports, that sort of thing.
How do you handle the dreadful behaviour of people on GM multiplayer? I'm 33, so it doesn't affect me at all (Counter Strike veteran here) but I showed my 8-year-old nephew and was like ... uhh maybe we'll play a different game, then.
Well, funny thing... I really didn't play it much online, so I didn't even realize he was playing on servers for a while. He was 10ish when he started (15 now). When I started looking over his shoulder, I was shocked at some of the other players behavior! I once intervened and took control of the keyboard to scold another player who kept holding him up and taking his cars, money, etc. Turns out it was a role playing server... the other player was his friend, playing a criminal. I kind of left him alone after that!
Ah, I remember my older son being quite addicted to CP back in the day. It seemed to be a cool platform, really easy for kids to use and interact with their friends. I think I even paid for a couple of annual subscriptions.
But I think I will be sadder to see it go than my son would, purely from a nostalgia standpoint and for the sake of remembering those days of innocence...
My kid was never into CP but I think just about everything he is into will eventually disappear just like this. Anything that requires an account to function is doomed to fade from existence.
I've been thinking about this for a few years. It's one reason that I don't care for online gaming; it's always in the back of my mind that the thing will disappear someday. That's one thing that draws me into retro games; they tend not to have external requirements like internet services, update patches, and so on.
There certainly are some games that are gone forever(I miss Glitch so much), but for the ones that stick around I've always appreciated how accessible they are compared to retro gaming.
The chances of me playing GoldenEye without a lot of effort(finding a working N64, or illegally downloading a ROM) is pretty low. Being able to load up my old save file is probably zero. (Unless the cart happens to be in my parents attic).
On the other hand I can open a web browser from pretty much any computer in the world today and get back on to Neopets or Runescape in seconds, and be right where I left off a decade ago.
Ah, thanks for the clarification. I was not aware of that acronym. I guess it depends on what world you move in. Those in law enforcement or counselling, I guess it would be an every day thing, but for the rest of us, it is completely meaningless...
Or those who have friends with "off" senses of humor, have hung out in uncensored and unmoderated forums, watched enough television about crime, and so on. I don't remember where I first heard those letters used in that way, but I imagine it was about 15 years ago, when I was in high school.
To be clear, in context, your post only reads awkwardly for me after having the alternate parsing of "CP" pointed out. Your intended "Club Penguin" meaning was the first way that I read your comment.
Interesting addendum - I asked my wife that that acronym would mean to her (she used to be a counsellor, and for a time was involved with sexual assault victim counselling), and to her, "CP" was "Child Protection", as in "call CP Services...".
So there you go - a total polar opposite association of those initials...
It represents the death of the original Club Penguin though. Nowadays it's all commercials. Disney-themed penguins and adverts for the latest kids movies.
It's a whole new platform with no migration path, from what I can understand. So my son, if he wanted to, could never transfer all his hard work of gathering assets, building stuff and friendships across to the new platform. He basically has to kiss his Penguin goodbye.
puffle is one of their trademarked applications they made that was a spin-off of the Club Penquin IP. I am pretty sure that they closed down those projects and most likely just made the URL just link back to the Parent/Main site.
Same here - although my daughter doesn't play consistently. Thankfully I've got her jazzed about TF2 now that she's a bit older and has gotten good with the WADS/FPS controls.
I think any parent with a child who's an active CP player is thinking two things: "Oh man, I got to break it to my kid" and "Great! Now they'll stop nagging me for a paid subscription"
From the sounds of this thread Club Penguin need to get right on damage limitation and make sure this is reported in media as "Club Penguin upgrading to Club Penguin Island" or somesuch. Presumably they want to move their current user-base rather than kill it off and start again.
Sounds like they're having a PR disaster if this thread is representative.
> Thankfully I've got her jazzed about TF2 now that she's a bit older and has gotten good with the WADS/FPS controls.
You probably already know, but I'd highly recommend Overwatch in that kind of niche. Similar co-operative FPS gameplay with a more vibrant/interesting backstory/world and characters, and very polished. It's got me doing more gaming than I have for perhaps a decade (heck, it's even good enough to be worth putting up with a non-Steam platform).
Try bootcamping it? It works for me half-decently on my Mac. If you have the 2016 Macbook, you can even get an external GPU setup with some research and $.
It's just ESDF, just move your WASD fingers one to the right. Works great for touch-typists because we don't have to move our hands. I highly suggest you give it a shot.
All I ever knew about Club Penguin was that for a while it was popular for people to post dirty stuff there to get banned and then submit a screenshot of the ban to Reddit. [0]
Oh man! My very first job, I worked for the studio that made the Club Penguin DS game. Cut my teeth on assembly (for a profiler) and a FLC video decoder (void * cast to structs, anyone?). Good times!
Also, my immediate boss / mentor was the spouse of EA Spouse. Dude was (and almost certainly still is) a ridiculously amazing engineer.
Not nearly enough material. Probably enough for a good blog post. Lan (the guy) probably has enough material, but I only worked with him for a few months.
I think the best quote came from a mutual friend (paraphrased, because decade ago) "When I first met Lan, I made a resolution: I'd be as good as he was in a year. Then I got to know him, and realized: I could be as good as Lan was; he got better faster than I could catch up."
Yeah, I'm sure that played a significant role. It's getting harder and harder to run Flash these days. My understanding is that some browsers require a fairly complex, multi-window process to add a domain to the Flash whitelist, and that this is only going to get worse, culminating in Flash's complete removal over the next 1-2 years.
They likely decided that moving to mobile-only and abandoning the desktop market was better than trying to write a WebGL/HTML5 compliant client.
Is there a good way to preserve and run flash content as we move into this brave new flash-free world, with good long-term prospects? At least the stuff that doesn't require a server component?
Lots of cool stuff from the mid-period Web was flash. All of Homestarrunner, obviously. Thousands of games. JibJab was (is?) big, and IIRC their early stuff was Flash. Various animated shorts of varying character and quality (remember when Stickperson Fight animations were big? The best were usually in Flash)
I haven't tried the Gnash player in a while (years), but when I did try, it was pretty promising for playing swf files that were just animations. A lot of them have also ended up as rendered video on places like Youtube.
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[ 5.9 ms ] story [ 206 ms ] threadHe ended up addicted to Pokemon :)
(The business model for these things is: hook the kids with the free version, get them to nag their parents to buy membership.)
Now she's into Pixelmon, a Pokemon-themed Minecraft mod, and various servers running it ;-D It's apparently in Technic Launcher, which will save you approximately forever downloading and setting up the precise version of the mod with the precise version of Minecraft.
Regardless of it's right or wrong to assume the content of a post based on its title, a much better title would make it clear the game is shutting down and not the company.
Again: completely accurate title, not as informative as it could be to anyone not already in the know.
[edit for clarity of point]
This is a major release that drops support for desktop platforms. So it's certainly a substantial change, but it's not fair to call it a shutdown.
If anything, the market for this type of game is only growing as mobile devices become a ubiquitous part of first-world childhoods. It would make no sense for a successful platform like Club Penguin to abandon that market, especially considering the vertical integration opportunities it provides to its parent company.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Club_Penguin
[0] https://m.youtube.com/watch?feature=youtu.be&v=RcU7FaEEzNU&t...
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2017/jan/30/brass-e...
Of course, terrorists were also confirmed to be using mail, telephones, text messages, email, and face to face conversations...
Let's be honest, it was a click bait article with no real substance to it.
...what
But I think I will be sadder to see it go than my son would, purely from a nostalgia standpoint and for the sake of remembering those days of innocence...
The chances of me playing GoldenEye without a lot of effort(finding a working N64, or illegally downloading a ROM) is pretty low. Being able to load up my old save file is probably zero. (Unless the cart happens to be in my parents attic).
On the other hand I can open a web browser from pretty much any computer in the world today and get back on to Neopets or Runescape in seconds, and be right where I left off a decade ago.
Or those who have friends with "off" senses of humor, have hung out in uncensored and unmoderated forums, watched enough television about crime, and so on. I don't remember where I first heard those letters used in that way, but I imagine it was about 15 years ago, when I was in high school.
To be clear, in context, your post only reads awkwardly for me after having the alternate parsing of "CP" pointed out. Your intended "Club Penguin" meaning was the first way that I read your comment.
So there you go - a total polar opposite association of those initials...
I think any parent with a child who's an active CP player is thinking two things: "Oh man, I got to break it to my kid" and "Great! Now they'll stop nagging me for a paid subscription"
Sounds like they're having a PR disaster if this thread is representative.
You probably already know, but I'd highly recommend Overwatch in that kind of niche. Similar co-operative FPS gameplay with a more vibrant/interesting backstory/world and characters, and very polished. It's got me doing more gaming than I have for perhaps a decade (heck, it's even good enough to be worth putting up with a non-Steam platform).
No Overwatch for me, I'm on a Mac.
It's never too early to get them started on ESDF.
[0] http://www.animaljam.com
[0] https://reddit.com/r/bannedfromclubpenguin
Also, my immediate boss / mentor was the spouse of EA Spouse. Dude was (and almost certainly still is) a ridiculously amazing engineer.
I think the best quote came from a mutual friend (paraphrased, because decade ago) "When I first met Lan, I made a resolution: I'd be as good as he was in a year. Then I got to know him, and realized: I could be as good as Lan was; he got better faster than I could catch up."
I was a CP member, and played fairly religiously for a few years. It was one of the first things I got an account for on the internet.
Farewell CP. We will... Not exactly miss you, but, you know.
I would guess it was their reliance on Flash which motivated writing a new mobile version.
They likely decided that moving to mobile-only and abandoning the desktop market was better than trying to write a WebGL/HTML5 compliant client.
Lots of cool stuff from the mid-period Web was flash. All of Homestarrunner, obviously. Thousands of games. JibJab was (is?) big, and IIRC their early stuff was Flash. Various animated shorts of varying character and quality (remember when Stickperson Fight animations were big? The best were usually in Flash)