The Evolution of ‘Club Penguin’ In Meme Culture

For a 15-year-old, discontinued browser game, Club Penguin has left an undeniable mark on meme culture. The game was such a major staple of the early-to-mid 2000s that its parent company was acquired by Disney in a reported $700-million deal in 2007, and even after being officially shut down in 2017, its legacy has lived on gloriously through private servers and memes.

Even if you’ve never played the game, you’ve likely seen its influence somewhere around the web without even noticing it, making it an important piece of meme history worth investigating. In celebration of Club Penguin, here’s a quick history of Club Penguin’s memes in a roughly chronological order.

Tipping The Club Penguin Iceberg (2005/2006)

Since the earliest days of Club Penguin, players have shared one common goal: tipping the iceberg.

The iceberg is, as it sounds, a location in Club Penguin that resembles a floating chunk of ice. Shortly after the game launched, word began to spread that if you gathered enough penguins on one side of the berg, it would flip. Some rumors said the penguins needed to be in hard hats, others said the penguins needed to all use the jackhammer emote.

Nobody knows who started the rumor, but it spread fast and hard, becoming the biggest rumor and meme in Club Penguin history. In the early days of the game, you could always see penguins gathered at the left side of the iceberg jackhammering away to no avail, refusing to give up on the possibility that it could flip. Then, one day… it did.

In honor of the meme, the Club Penguin programmers coded in the ability to flip the iceberg during the game’s “Final Party.” It was a glorious moment for all penguin kind and the perfect ending to the game that so many had grown up with. Of course, this was only one of the many powerful memes that came from the game.

Club Penguin Armies (2006)

One of the most popular pastimes in Club Penguin was always snowball fights. These fights would sometimes grow huge in scale, attracting everyone on the map to start throwing wildly. Naturally, this progressed into full-scale wars with designated armies in early 2006.

Club Penguin armies became one of the biggest crazes among the game’s players. There were dozens of these armies by the game’s end with their own lore and communities, as well as whole websites dedicated to reporting on news of the wars going on between the various armies.

Some of the most popular armies included the Purple Republic, an “evil army” allegedly run by a hacker whose main goal was to annoy other players, and the “Nachos,” an early army that ran around in sombreros and ponchos.

The Club Penguin armies community is seriously large and seriously involved. The fandom page for the “Nachos” alone is massive and reveals the existence of multiple full-blown wars in Club Penguin, including a “World War II” and the “Color Wars” (also known as WWI), which acted as a jumping-off point for the earliest of the game’s armies. If you need something to binge read, you could do a lot worse than the Club Penguin’s fandom sections on armies.

The Club Penguin Dance / Club Penguin Music Videos (2009-Ongoing)

The Club Penguin dance has transcended Club Penguin on a level unlike any other Club Penguin meme has managed to. First added to the game in 2009, the dance quickly became a favorite emote among players for how fun and generally funny it is to watch.

In the earliest days of the dance, it was used in Club Penguin music videos. Club Penguin music videos were a whole trend of their own that seems to have cropped up around the same time, seeing players create music videos out of screenshots and clips from the game. Usually, they’d feature the characters singing the lyrics through the game’s in-game text bubbles.

The Club Penguin dance continued to be a staple of memes throughout the 2010s, appearing in formats such as Hey Stinky’d, where the dance is done by Mario. It really transcended the game in 2020 when it was recreated by Jaiden Animations almost perfectly though. This inspired a lot of memers to apply the dance to other characters, turning the dance into a perfect mechanism for shitposting.

The dance has even taken on a new life on TikTok, with videos of people doing it occasionally going viral on the platform. If that isn’t a sign of the game’s continual relevancy, I don’t know what is.

Club Penguin: I Will Never Forget You & Love Story (2012, 2013)

Club Penguin: I Will Never Forget You and Club Penguin: Love Story are YouTube dramas made using Club Penguin screenshots, and they may just be the most underrated pieces of Club Penguin meme gold on the web.

These multi-part series are full of the type of melodramatic emotion that only a Club Penguin-obsessed kid in 2012 could have created. They’re full of dramatic twists and turns, copyrighted music and heartbreaking dialogue between colorful penguins reminiscent of a soap opera. In many Club Penguin fans' eyes, these are like the Titanic of Club Penguin narrative memes.

Fanfiction and content is a massive part of the Club Penguin community, and these videos represent just how far some fans will take their love of the series. CPLoveStories entire channel is Club Penguin meme gold, and its impact on the game’s meme culture can not be ignored.

Club Penguin Ruined (November 2015)

Club Penguin Ruined was the breakout series from Cowbelly founder Graham, now known for running and managing a number of popular meme accounts. The series ran between 2015 and 2017, and was extremely popular at the time. Essentially, it consists of funny Club Penguin screenshots and skits read by a text-to-speech voice.

The videos are simple in structure, but they helped put Cowbelly on the map and are still funny today. Screenshots from these videos still spread around the web, and the series inspired a lot of copycats, helping solidify out-of-context Club Penguin screenshots as viable memes to this day.

Club Penguin Island / #Bissonmickey (September 2018)

Club Penguin Island was an early, official attempt at a revival of Club Penguin by Disney Canada. It ran for a little over a year before shutting down, failing to capture the magic of the original. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t important in the game’s history though, and most notably, it resulted in the largest raid in Club Penguin history, known as the Bissonmickey raid.

The raid was hosted by YouTuber Quackity, who went live on the game on September 1st, 2018, and started bashing it for its limitations. He then persuaded his viewers into joining the game as “piss-colored” penguins in protest of Club Penguin Island, soon inspiring users to chant “biss on Mickey,” a way of saying “piss on Mickey” (referring to Mickey Mouse) without being censored by the game.

Club Penguin Island may not have been good, but at least it was so bad that it inspired a good meme. What more can anyone really ask for?

Club Penguin Is Kil (March 2019)

With the death of Club Penguin two years in the rearview mirror, nostalgia for the game inspired a number of memes mourning it in 2019, most notably Club Penguin Is Kil, a spin on the John is Kil meme, which is based on a poorly written 2012 4chan post asking what people were doing when John Lennon died.

Better than any, Club Penguin Is Kil shows how nostalgic the game has become in the minds of memers. The meme directly (albeit jokingly) asks users to reflect on what they were doing when Club Penguin was closed, ultimately comparing the impact of the event to that of John Lennon’s death, as intended by the “John Is Kil” meme. It’s all in the name of irony, but the effectiveness of the meme and the fact that so many got involved in it is very telling of the game’s reach and permanent place in the hearts of memers.

The Evolution of Club Penguin Memes

More than just a game, Club Penguin has proven to be a substantial meme powerhouse throughout the 21st century, even after its death in 2017. The game now lives on through memes and Club Penguin: Rewritten, a private server hosting the game exactly as it was before closure. How long Rewritten will last though, remains to be seen. Disney struck down a number of private Club Penguin servers last year, meaning it’s likely only a matter of time before the game is swiped from players’ hands yet again.

Even if Rewritten is taken down though, the game will never die as long as memers keep on viewing it through nostalgic lenses, and keep finding new ways to keep it fresh. That, or until the Disney gods finally re-release the game in a respectful way.

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