The Walt Disney Company has shut down the latest attempt to reboot the popular children’s video game Club Penguin.
Club Penguin Rewritten, a private server hosting the popular online video game, shut down Wednesday after Disney issued a copyright request to the fan website. The website offered an alternative method for playing the massively multiplayer video game after the game’s servers were shut down in 2017. Three people were reportedly arrested in connection to the shutdown.
“We have voluntarily given control over the website to the police for them to continue their copyright investigation,” the website said in a statement Wednesday.
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Law enforcement confirmed the shutdown and the arrests.
“Following a complaint under copyright law, PIPCU have seized a gaming website as part of an ongoing investigation into the site,” Detective Constable Daryl Fryatt of London’s Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit told the Washington Examiner. “Three people were arrested on April 12 on suspicion of distributing materials infringing copyright, and searches were carried out.”
Those who were arrested have been released under investigation, and they have agreed to sign the website over to the control of PIPCU, Fryatt said.
A moderator on the private server confirmed the closing but declined further comment, according to the fan site ClubPenguinMountains.
Initially released in 2005, Club Penguin was a massive multiplayer video game designed for children between the ages of 6 and 14. The game also restricted speech so children would not be exposed to profane or sexual language. Disney acquired the website in 2007 and shut down the game’s servers in 2017 after a significant decline in popularity.
Shuttered servers have not stopped players from attempting fan-run servers to keep the product alive. Several private servers have arisen in an attempt to keep the game going since its 2017 shutdown, including Club Penguin Rewritten.
Disney has taken several actions to shut down these private servers. The company issued a Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedown in May 2020 against Club Penguin Online, another fan-run server. The moderators running the server complied with the order and shut down the site immediately.
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But that shutdown had other problems surrounding it. The game was not being moderated by its staff, and its chat was full of content deemed racist and antisemitic, the BBC discovered. One of the website’s owners was also arrested on suspicion of possessing child abuse images.
Disney did not respond to a request for comment from the Washington Examiner.
