![]() “Around this time, several staff members resigned after being treated poorly by their superiors,” Lost Mitten claims. “At what point does it not become a hobby? At what point is it a profitable enterprise, or a criminal enterprise?” “As if the game wasn’t already covered with ads, CPR added a button for watching ads that would reward you with coins or items.” The administrators of the site purportedly purchased a house using ad revenue from the game, angering many in the community. “I felt like the game shifted from being a healthy, tight-knit community to more of a cash grab,” Lost Mitten says. “Every day, people were streaming and releasing videos, and because of this, I became heavily involved in the Club Penguin Rewritten YouTube community.” He went on to meet up with fellow Club Penguin Rewritten YouTubers and players IRL.īut things changed in mid-2020. “It had all of the things that made Club Penguin special,” Lost Mitten says. Lost Mitten, a 20-year-old user, joined the game in April 2017. While Disney may not be currently profiting off the Club Penguin IP, those running the fan-made versions appeared to have been. One reason that Club Penguin Rewritten may have drawn the attention of Disney and police is the way the game has changed. “They’re not profiting off the Club Penguin IP,” he says, pointing to the fact that Disney has not used the brand name in years. But he questions why Disney decided to act at all. ( Rewritten has since introduced new elements to the game.) “There’s no question about Club Penguin Rewritten infringing on property in that sense,” Torres 126 admits. Initially, Club Penguin Rewritten’s website design and features were coopted from the original. “It caught a lot of people off-guard,” he adds. He’s the founder of Club Penguin Mountains, a website that covers all the developments in the Club Penguin space. who first started playing the original game in 2010. “No one really knows why they’ve chosen this moment to take down Club Penguin Rewritten,” says Torres 126, an 18-year-old Club Penguin Rewritten enthusiast from the U.K. However, he did confirm that he was not arrested as part of what was dubbed Operation Creative. A third person associated with Club Penguin Rewritten, Gravix, listed as a developer on the site, declined to speak to Input, claiming he is underage. Thorn has deleted their Discord profile, while stu’s is configured to not accept messages from people who were not their friends on Discord (while not accepting new friend requests). Neither of the site’s two administrators at the time of its closure, who went by the usernames stu and Thorn, were available to comment. (It’s not clear why action was taken in London.) “There’s no question about ‘Club Penguin Rewritten’ infringing on property.” “To aid with the police investigation, they agreed to sign over the website to the control of PIPCU.” Fryatt would not confirm the identities or ages of those arrested.Īt the same time, the platform’s Discord server went silent, with a single message on the community saying it was “shutting down effective immediately due to a full request by Disney.” The Discord and Club Penguin Rewritten admins said in the message that they had voluntarily ceded control of the website to the police so that the authorities could continue their copyright investigation. ![]() ![]() “Following a complaint under copyright law, PIPCU have seized a gaming website as part of an ongoing investigation into the site,” Fryatt says. The logo of the City of London Police sat at the top of the website, and underneath it was a stark message: “This site has been taken over by Operation Creative, Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit (PIPCU).”ĭetective Constable Daryl Fryatt of the City of London Police confirms to Input that three people were arrested on April 12 and subsequently released under investigation on suspicion of distributing materials infringing copyright. On April 13, users expecting to visit the usual colorful world of Club Penguin Rewritten were suddenly confronted with something altogether different: The site had literally gone dark. Club Penguin Rewritten was a way to preserve cherished online memories without the fear of closure at the whims of a private, profit-focused company like Disney. Launched a month before Club Penguin itself shut down, Club Penguin Rewritten (one of several fan-made alternatives) was a private server that offered much of the same functionality that the original did. For a generation of children, Club Penguin was their entry onto the internet - and they weren’t willing to let it go as adults. ![]()
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