Club Penguin Still Works, and It's Even Better Than You Remember

Club Penguin communities are thriving "in quar," as the Club Penguin teens say.

Club Penguin Online
Club Penguin Online
Club Penguin Online

We get it: Everybody's bored right now and trying to find ways to keep busy. Maybe after streaming a year's worth of movies and shows in the span of a month, you've turned to gaming and got sucked into the Animal Crossing: New Horizons craze or tapped into tried-but-true computer games like The Sims. But when times are dire, sometimes all we want is a little nostalgia.

Like Neopets before it, the Disney-owned Club Penguin, a massive multiplayer online world where countless people of a certain age (ie. tweens) created their own penguins to combat and chat with others, was the shit in its aughts/early 2010s heyday. Fortunately, you don't have to pine for the days of pet puffles and souping up your igloo any longer because the game in all its glory is up and running. While the official site went defunct in 2017, in the years since, two separate private gaming servers, Club Penguin Online and Club Penguin Rewrittenrelaunched versions of the game to fuel nostalgia -- Online being the 2013-2017 version of the game and Rewritten being the original, older style millennials played in the 2000s. As of recent, the games seem to have seen more players than ever logging on -- probably since we're all desperate to stay connected and occupied. 

club penguin online
Club Penguin Online

It should come as no surprise because that people are logging back on because, turns out, it's still amazing! The same thing goes on both Online and Rewritten -- you create a penguin and can travel around the kitschy arctic world, chatting with others and playing minigames -- but half of the fun is seeing how frozen in time it all is, partiulally Club Penguin Rewritten. Remember how there were always penguins trying to "flip" the igloo? Well, they're still at it! All of the minigames you loved, from the sled races to Pizzatron 3000 at the pizza parlor and the Hydro Hopper down by the docks, are still fully in-tact. Perhaps now that you're older, wiser, and don't have limited screen time like you might've back in the day, you'll be able to play so many games you can finally secure all of the coins you need to buy the penguin 'fits and puffle accessories you eyed years ago. (I, for one, have my eyes on a very cool red cheerleading uniform.)

club penguin online
Club Penguin Online

Club Penguin isn't just great for killing time, though. It's also a solid alternative for social interaction in a time when we can't really socialize outside of the virtual world anyway. As soon as you log on, you'll notice just about everyone is talking about their life "in quar," with kids discussing what they like and dislike about e-learning ("sleeping in is nice" / "it sucks") and even offering pseudo therapy sessions back at their igloo. And fear not, not everybody on the site is in middle school: College professors are apparently offering office hours in specific servers, and people who grew up with the game are planning community functions like birthday parties. If you need even more reason to believe how dope it is, indie rock darling Soccer Mommy even hosted a live concert on Club Penguin Rewritten. Like, it's great! So why not trade your Zoom happy hour for a meet-up at the Ski Village followed by a snow tubing race instead? 

If you reveal your real age in-game, some of the target audience penguins may make fun of you, but don't let that keep you away from the site. (The severity of the own will depend on whether you're in a "mature" chat or the same, original filtered one, anyway.) There's other 20-somethings like myself logging on, enjoying that sweet throwback and doing stuff like chatting with fellow penguins, like ones who did a call out for Timothée Chalamet fans to meet up at the pizza parlor. Basically, there's no better way to both bond with strangers while simultaneously feel like you're back on your parents' desktop in 2007. You may not be able to come back to 6th grade with bragging rights about your Club Penguin boyfriend who has 30+ puffles, but it'll at least take you to a place online you didn't know you missed, and could keep you so plugged in for hours on end. 

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Sadie Bell is the entertainment editorial assistant at Thrillist. She's on Twitter at @mssadiebell.