Club Penguin’s best fan community shuts down in the most perfect way

Although Club Penguin shuts down tonight at 12:01 a.m. PT, a Reddit forum dedicated to the kid-friendly browser game has closed up shop a little early. Banned from Club Penguin, a subreddit where players catalogued ways they got their penguins kicked out for good, has gone private, and it’s left behind a perfect goodbye note.

When the subreddit loads, it has a pretty clear message for visitors: “You’ve all been banned from /r/bannedfromclubpenguin.”

Reddit

After years of courting eternal banishment from Club Penguin, the moderators of the prankster community get to be in the driver’s seat. It’s a bittersweet end for a forum that spawned a new category of speedrunning and reignited adult interest in the browser game that defined many of our preteen years.

Getting intentionally banned from Club Penguin began in earnest in 2009, as a favorite pasttime of 4chan’s gaming section. That spun off into the dedicated subreddit about people’s most obscene ways of getting their membership revoked, amassing thousands of subscribers over the years.

The shutdown may seem premature to the players still checking out the game one last time before midnight, however — surely there are those who wanted to wait until Club Penguin’s final day to get permanently banned from the game.

There’s also a revamped version of the game hitting mobile phones tomorrow, so there will be more opportunities to be banned. Maybe Banned from Club Penguin will open its doors again when Club Penguin Island, the free-to-play smartphone take of the classic game, launches.