Long ago, a simple web developer was a part of a community that made modifications to a popular Flash MMO called Club Penguin. He was not that well discovered within the community but was friends with some of their admins, making add-ons and talking about improvements for the program to enhance the game's experience. In 2015, he decided to create his own version of Club Penguin after being inspired by popular CPPSes of the time and failed attempts from the admins he knew.
Some of the earliest archived work for the CPPS date back to March 2015, but the real work did not begin until January 2016. In the early stages, the game did not have a name or an idea of its existence other than being made because a simple web developer wanted to make his own game. Originally the game was going to be developed under the classic version of Club Penguin (when the unsecured AS2 loader was in use rather than the final AS3 club_penguin.swf loader) with a developer name of IcePenguin (find the logo and it here later), but after running the dev version in localhost, something felt very "wrong" with the game. As months go by, not understanding what was "wrong" with the game, Disney publishes a notice regarding the shut down of classic Club Penguin. With the heart reaching news, it became clear what was "wrong" with the current CPPS being developed. Swiftly the game's direction was changed to be developed following the modern Club Penguin protocols and style. Following the change in production, the game was given a new name.
Alpha Penguin begins. Here is where the magic begins, Bobby [redacted] starts talking about the development of his CPPS to his admin friends and they were immediately interested in the project—asking to be Alpha Penguin developers once Club Penguin shuts down. Hearing that put a shimmer of light in Bobby's eye. The new team quickly began working on the server (ran on a custom system called AlphaKit) and the client (of Club Penguin's AS3 loader era). With a small team consisting of, WindowsTV, Johnny, Snowfire, CPHax2, Tootyta, and I (Bobby), we created Alpha Penguin.
On June 23, 2017, at midnight (EST), Alpha Penguin was released to the public for beta testing. WindowsTV and Tootyta greeted new players as they joined the server for the first time, letting them know what they could do during the beta party. The beta party was a coder's mess. While the team was still trying to reverse engineer the client's code, bugs were found in every corner; however, this did not stop the players' positive reviews. The game was an instant success thanks in part to the great advertising opportunities through WindowsTV and his connections. Later on, the game generated a fan-made Discord server to push the game's existence even further, which put the thought of it in the hands of some very influential Club Penguin YouTubers.
As time went on, Alpha Penguin grew larger and larger by the minute, but all of that changed when the fire nation attacked. In all seriousness, sometime after the Wilderness Expedition party, Alpha Penguin started to halt in new players; nobody on the team knew exactly why. So in an attempt to drive new players to the game, we had decided to advertise more; we even got help from some players who were very active within our community. However, it did not seem to help. People were harassing staff members and community members so far to tell them to "f**k off with this Alpha Penguin Bull S**t. I play Club Penguin Rewritten and that is it". I was not fond of the way my friends were being treated and I had asked them to stop. It turns out some of the influential YouTubers were invoking drama regarding Alpha Penguin to their fan-bases even so far to flat out say, "I tried out Alpha Penguin because [redacted] CPPS told me to show off new games and say they are not safe." At the time, I did not know about this, I thought there were just disappointed people out there whom genuinely hated Alpha Penguin because our content was slow to come out. In a blog post, I had posted about how secure our systems was because I truly did believe in it. We have had multiple attempted attacks on the game's server, but none of them prevailed because we were always one step ahead. It is a shame that one influential person can knock down another's creation in a heartbeat based on lies. Seeing other CPPSes flourish while they had been breached and built on horrific development staff made me think about the future of Alpha Penguin.
We were thinking about closing before you even knew. Many times I thought about shutting down the game, but my team said we should continue. Then, Adobe announces they were to stop developing the programming language we used for Alpha Penguin, Adobe Flash. To me, this felt like a sign not only for Alpha Penguin but Club Penguin itself. By this time, Club Penguin Island—which was supposed to be the successor of classic Club Penguin was gearing to shut down. I believed Club Penguin has reached its milestone and should be left as a beautiful memory. Throughout the atmosphere of Alpha Penguin was the development of a project called Alpha Heart, which was based on a program that WindowsTV once worked on to house a version of Adobe Flash in a sandbox environment. But due to the original developers of the program leaving the world of Club Penguin behind, WindowsTV and two other Alpha Penguin devs working on Alpha Heart could not get the program to function like it once had in its previous embodiment. So Alpha Heart was scrapped, the same team attempted to bring Alpha Penguin to JavaScript, but the task was too daunting for the dwindling team I had left. So I cut the JavaScript project as well.
Time to close down the game. On May 18, 2020, the Alpha Penguin Flash game shut its door permanently to the public. We had received a DMCA notice from "Disney" after hundreds were sent out to various games due to an instance with another unsafe CPPS. To comply with the notice, we decided to turn off Alpha Penguin's Flash world. We were not sure if it was real or not, but we were not going to take the chance. Besides, with everything mentioned already, it felt right to turn off the game's server. However, we had a party we were excited to do still, so we invited some hard-core Alpha Penguin fans to an invite-only Flash world where they could experience Alpha Penguin one final time. It made me sad to see how many people actually cared about the game and happy to have them together for one last event. After that, the Flash world was finally switched off. Nevertheless, that was not the end of Alpha Penguin.
JavaScript, OH BOY! With the development team I had left, we looked over Alpha Penguin in JavaScript one final time...nope, we still could not do it, haha! But we set out on doing a project called Mini Alpha, which is a set of Mini Games you could play straight from any browser that supported JavaScript. Right now, we offer Find Four to our community, but since that game's release, I have put a pause on development because the team and I have decided to resume personal things in our lives. That being said, I always think about continuing to add more games to Alpha Penguin as I love programming, so maybe one day you will be able to log into your penguin once more and connect with friends to play some nostalgic mini-games from your past.
Thank you for everything, and thank you for reading this. Alpha Penguin has been a wonderful experience for me, and I'd do it all again if I could.
-Waddle Around