
Club Penguin is shutting down - 18nleung
http://puffl.es/2jMtlPJ
======
cyberferret
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...

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phailhaus
That is such an unfortunate acronym...

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cglouch
for those unaware, "CP" often refers to child pornography

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cyberferret
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...

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khedoros1
> Those in law enforcement or counseling

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.

~~~
cyberferret
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...

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dbalan
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,"

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Club_Penguin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Club_Penguin)

~~~
falcolas
More specifically, it's an MMO aimed at children. With restricted chat and
simplistic gameplay, it was very popular with the under 14 crowd.

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strgrd
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.

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Jonnax
Wasn't that a joke in the film Four Lions?

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J-dawg
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.

[0]
[https://m.youtube.com/watch?feature=youtu.be&v=RcU7FaEEzNU&t...](https://m.youtube.com/watch?feature=youtu.be&v=RcU7FaEEzNU&t=20m15s)

[1] [https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-
radio/2017/jan/30/brass-e...](https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-
radio/2017/jan/30/brass-eye-at-20-still-chris-morris-at-his-hysterical-
gobsmacking-best)

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toomanybeersies
How did anyone ever think that it was serious? It's so obviously satire.

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RangerScience
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.

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rocky1138
Write a book! I'll buy it.

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RangerScience
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."

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eriknstr
The title "Club Penguin is shutting down" isn't perfect. They are launching
something called "Club Penguin Island".

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james-skemp
Except they are shutting down the current app and system. So the title seems
to be accurate.

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sbuttgereit
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.

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ReverseCold
Disney's not going under anytime soon.

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sbuttgereit
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.

[edit for clarity of point]

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personjerry
Why is this a link to puffl.es instead of the Club Penguin site directly?

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Delcorum
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.

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amyjess
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]

[0]
[https://reddit.com/r/bannedfromclubpenguin](https://reddit.com/r/bannedfromclubpenguin)

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Neliquat
Pools closed forever.

~~~
dickbasedregex
That was Habbo Hotel. Was that shenanigan used at CP too?

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hatsunearu
Not AFAIK, just a reference it seems.

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hatsunearu
And they are launching a successor, Club Penguin Island which is apparently
just the same thing but better, so there's that.

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Angostura
Not better if your kids play it on desktop.

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justinhj
True but they can still do so with an Android emulator like Andy

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Angostura
Oh god, I'm going to have to break this to my daughters this evening.

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josefresco
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"

~~~
lmm
> 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).

~~~
josefresco
Thanks for the tip - I think the part she likes the best is we get to play
together/co-op

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baldfat
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.

He ended up addicted to Pokemon :)

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baldfat
My youngest son loved the Marvel Hero Up Squad game at heroup.com. It closed
this month.

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mavhc
Moderated Lego forums are closing this month too, weird

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qwertyuiop924
I was a kid in the early 2000s, so my perspective is somewhat different to
many here.

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.

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mgcross
My son used to love CP, played off and on until I introduced him to Garry's
Mod.

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Angostura
What does your son do with GM? Seriously interested.

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mgcross
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.

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TazeTSchnitzel
Is the death of Flash causing problems for them? Unless something I'm unaware
of happened, the entire client is still built in it.

I would guess it was their reliance on Flash which motivated writing a new
mobile version.

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cookiecaper
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.

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ashark
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)

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khedoros1
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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bencollier49
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.

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cschmidt
My son played a lot of Club Penguin when he was younger. Now my daughter is
playing Animal Jam instead.

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jasikpark
Nooo!!!! My childhood!!!!!

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Endy
Aww. Too bad.

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jamesmp98
Damn no more trolling

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adtac
You were trolling 10 year olds? Really?

