Why UK police took over this 'Club Penguin' site yesterday

A clone of Club Penguin gave its enthusiastic fans a chance to revisit the beloved virtual world, but the legacy that started in Kelowna has been shut down once again.

Club Penguin, a place for young gamers to play as digital penguin avatars, became very popular after launching in 2005. The local developers sold the game to the Walt Disney Company in 2007.

Co-creator Lane Merrifield from Kelowna went on to become an angel investor on the CBC show Dragon's Den. 

Ten years after the sale, the game's popularity had been in steady decline, so it was Disney that decided to pull the plug in 2017.

READ MORE: Is Kelowna's Club Penguin fairy tale over?

But many of the fans Club Penguin amassed during its golden era weren’t ready to move on.

The game’s code was reproduced for an online game called Club Penguin Rewritten, which was very similar to the original version. It launched in October 2017, about half a year after Club Penguin came to an end.

In March 2020, the first month of the pandemic, the Rewritten version of the game experienced massive growth. 

Even five years after its launch, the Rewritten version appeared to be gaining in popularity. Less than a week ago on April 9, an update was shared to the page by “stu,” who said the site had just reached a new record for number of users registered in 24 hours.

But anybody who tries to play Club Penguin Rewritten today will not be able to. Its web page indicates that the site was taken over yesterday by the City of London Police from the United Kingdom.

“This site has been taken over by Operation Creative, Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit,” is the only thing stated on the page, which has a "City of London Police" letterhead.

Before Club Penguin Rewritten was taken over by the police, it had a disclaimer at the bottom, reading “Club Penguin Rewritten is a fan-made recreation of Disney's Club Penguin and is not affiliated with The Walt Disney Company and/or Disney Games and Interactive Experiences.”

READ MORE: Kelowna tech entrepreneur wins court case to kick ex out of his basement

The bootleg version of the game was running ads on the site which may not have sat well with Disney.

Emails to Disney and the London police were not responded to before publication.

To get a rough idea of what Club Penguin Rewritten looked like when it was active, type the address – cprewritten.net – into the Way Back Machine. 

To contact a reporter for this story, email Dan Walton or call 250-488-3065 or email the editor. You can also submit photos, videos or news tips to the newsroom and be entered to win a monthly prize draw.

We welcome your comments and opinions on our stories but play nice. We won't censor or delete comments unless they contain off-topic statements or links, unnecessary vulgarity, false facts, spam or obviously fake profiles. If you have any concerns about what you see in comments, email the editor in the link above.