The History of Club Penguin

Before Club Penguin, there was something called Penguin Chat (2005). You used to be able to play it on rocketsnail.com (Yes, that’s what rsnail stands for), but as of now, they have closed down the site so everyone visits Clubpenguin.com instead. Penguin Chat 3 was very fun, to tell you the truth.Back then, the whole thing was free and there were things on it that the Club Penguin Team never put back onto Club Penguin. I had two accounts on it.

It was actually very similar to Club Penguin, except there was only one place you could go to, the Town. There wasn’t a Cove, Snow Forts, Dojo, or your own home or anything else, but the Town. And no coins or way of earning coins. And if you tried to walk to the left of the town, you’d go to an area of nothing but snow, if you went to the left of that, you’d up in another another area of snow with a pretty blue sky. In this specific area, you might see a bunch of penguins in snowcats (look it up in dictionary) driving around. Then if you went left again, there would be a bunch of penguins just walking around with hard hats on that are probably drilling the ground, and then if you went left again, you’d be back at the Town (so it was kinda a circle). And you could also do the same thing if you started off going right from the Town.

In the toolbar, there was only the chatbox (If you chose Standard Safe Chat), the snowball button, the actions button, the emotes button, and the enter button. To change color, you would click the Gold M on the upper right, and select a different color. There was no map.
The Night Club was incredibly similar. The major differences were that the band played on the stage, rather than the DJ thing with the speakers. And there was no green puffle dancing on the speakers, and there were no stairs leading to the upper floor (there wasn’t an upper floor). And you could get to the Boiler room by walking onto the wire of the lower left Speaker. The point of the game was just to throw snowballs, dance, and chat.

Talking about snowballs, in Penguin Chat, snowballs were a little bit different. No, they looked the exact same, but when you threw them at people, sometimes you would miss horribly. The radar that shows up when you push the Snowball button in Club Penguin was different in Club Penguin. It would also snow sometimes in the Town.

The Coffee shop was somewhat boring, there was no upper level, and you couldn’t play Bean Counter there. Back then, everyone used to pretend they were Coffee shop servers.

Now, have you ever heard someone ask how you become a ninja? Well, this is where the myth started from (By the way, you CAN’T become a ninja in Club Penguin, they were going to make them, but they made Secret Agents instead). In Penguin Chat 3, when the color select window popped up after you click the Gold M, if you click the ‘N’ in ‘Club Penguin’ in that window, you would become a ninja (No lie, it also took me a long time to figure this out when I first started playing, no one would tell me). Being a ninja was pretty cool, you had a ninja suit with a sword on your back and if you tried dancing as a ninja, you wouldn’t dance but you’d become transparent/invisible.

You could also be a Hard Hat worker. You had to change into an orange penguin in the snowfields right of the Town to get the Hard hat (you didn’t have a player card back then so you didn’t really get a Hard hat, you just wore one). And if you danced, you would be drilling the ground. And if you went into the middle snow fields, you’d be driving a snowcat, sweet!

As for the Gift shop, if you tried walking into it, you’d be transported to a page in Rocketsnail.com where you can buy merchandise like real life keychains and T-shirts (using real life money though, Penguin Chat didn’t have coins, remember?).

And that’s just about all there was to Penguin Chat 3 (that used to be playable at rocketsnail.com).

Now here’s the sad part. One day, the Rocket Snail team announced they were creating something called Club Penguin. When I went to the site clubpenguin.com, all that was on its site was the logo and it said it was Under Construction. Then they closed Penguin chat for a while, so I had nothing to do but play Mancala, Ballistic Biscuit, and a few other games on rsnail.com

After waiting the rest of the summer for Club Penguin, I finally stopped checking the site everyday. When I looked again in late October, I had missed the grand opening, the Beta tests, and everything else. I’m pretty sure I made accounts but I can’t remember the names or email addresses anymore.

Also, there was a Club Penguin BETA testing. That was basically to try out the new Club Penguin beforehand. Beta testers got one month of free Club Penguin membership, they got to keep their party hat from the very first Club Penguin party ever, and a certain amount of coins (2,000).

Just a few more things before I let you go, no ninja myths are true. There’s one myth out there that says if you don’t move in the dojo for 30 minutes but stay logged on by talking and chatting, you’ll be a ninja. Don’t listen to those lies! Its just to waste your time! I knew it was a lie from the moment I heard it, and now I’ve tested it out just to prove it to you and nothing happened! (You can check it out yourself if you want to waste a half hour…)

And, last, you can check the Club Penguin Official Blog Archives for all old blog posts from Club Penguin ever since April 2005 here: http://blog.clubpenguin.com/archives/2005_08_01_archive.html

The archives are at the bottom of the page.

Also, this is all from memory and I’ve verified just about all my data to check that it is fact, not fiction. The only thing you might be even a little worried about is that I probably made a few accounts right after beta. But I’ve changed from Yahoo to Hotmail to Gmail email accounts over the years and I’ve forgotten almost all my emails. If I had created an account before or after Beta, its probably already deleted by now anyway, unfortunately.

Oh, and I found this pic over the Internet and it looks a lot like Penguin Chat, although I can’t guarantee its from PC3 but it looks like how I remember it. (Click to enlarge)

Finally, don’t be fooled by this: penguinchat.com This is not the Penguin Chat I was speaking of. This came out less than a year ago, I believe. Its a FAKE. The real Penguin Chat was only accessible on http://rocketsnail.com

~Watex