Why the world needs a Club Penguin successor – that isn’t Roblox

Club Penguin – the Disney-owned, Flash-based MMO, which ran from 2005 to 2017 – was a formative experience for a generation of children. Stephen MacDonald, who was a senior manager at Disney from 2012 to 2015, says that Club Penguin had over 300 million registered users at its peak.

But the demise of Adobe Flash put paid to this penguin paradise, and a mobile-focused successor, Club Penguin Island, failed to take off – it shut down in December 2018, around a year and a half after its launch.

Now, Roblox has risen to become many children’s first taste of the online world. But MacDonald thinks that Roblox is no replacement for the safety-centred approach Club Penguin provided.

“What used to happen is a kid would go from a preschool product, like Peppa Pig, and then would go to Club Penguin to learn what it was to be safe online, learn all those tools, then they would graduate to Fortnite or something like that.”

Now, he says, “you’ve got kids going from Peppa Pig to Roblox, and unfortunately, that is not safe enough for that age of kids. They are not ready for what’s in front of them and the social tools that they’re going to need to interact with a lot of adults.”

“In a lot of the competitive games, they’re just chum in the water for older kids and young adults. But also socially, it’s not safe. They’re being preyed upon.”

That’s why MacDonald has founded Magic Potion Games, with the aim of providing a spiritual successor to Club Penguin. The company has been backed by Square Enix, 1AM Gaming, 1Up Ventures, and Konvoy Ventures, and has sought guidance from industry veterans including Bungie founder Alex Seropian and Club Penguin co-founder Lane Merrifield. Importantly, their new game, Imagine Island, is putting a firm focus on live moderation and age-appropriate safety features, and is aimed squarely at children aged 6–13.

“Our whole thing was, let’s go back into that space, offer something for that kid coming from a preschool product,” says MacDonald. “Then they can graduate to something like Roblox or beyond.”

The old toy’s club

MacDonald is based in Kelowna, British Columbia, where the original Club Penguin was developed by New Horizon Interactive in the early 2000s, before being sold to Disney in 2007. He ran Club Penguin’s game design and production for several years, and he recalls the lengths the company went to to keep children safe.

“Not a lot of people understood how much effort went into it,” he says. “Just how many live moderators we had, just hundreds of people that were responsible for making sure that kids’ content was protected and no bad actors were coming in, how much we worked with law enforcement to make sure that people like predators were reported and moved off of our platform as soon as possible.”

“We developed the technology that became Community Sift,” he adds, referring to the chat filter and moderation tool spearheaded by Chris Priebe, brother of Club Penguin developer Lance Priebe, which was bought by Microsoft in 2021. “It was quite cutting edge for the time.”

But there were subtle behaviour nudges, too. MacDonald gives the example of a player walking into a room and saying “something edgy”, with the game making it appear as if the message had been received by other players, when in fact it had been blocked in the background. “It’s like going in and making a joke and no one laughs, and you’re like, ‘Ugh, that’s uncomfortable’. So you’d try something else, and then that would get through, and everyone would laugh. So we were able to really socially engineer what kind of content got through to everybody.”

“Club Penguin just worked on everything – that game worked on a toaster”

Ultimately, Club Penguin died with Flash. And although MacDonald wasn’t involved with the follow-up Club Penguin Island, he thinks the mobile pivot was ill-advised.

“At the time, there was a lot of pressure to get a mobile-only title, and it was like, ‘Hey, all kids are on mobile, let’s go in that direction’. There were a few of us that were like, ‘I don’t think that’s completely true’. A huge swath of our audience played on PC because of accessibility. [Club Penguin] just worked on everything – that game worked on a toaster. Everyone could jump on easily, and I think that was part of the secret formula.”

The rise of Roblox

In the years since Club Penguin’s demise, Roblox has grown spectacularly, rising from 13.7 million daily active users in Q4 2018 to 144 million in Q4 2025, according to Statista.

“We had been tracking Roblox since the beginning,” recalls MacDonald. “It’s like 20 years old at this point, and it was launched as a tools platform – it was not intentionally a kid’s product, it was built as a tool suite. So I think the DNA of the companies is very, very different. Club Penguin was built with an audience of kids in mind.”

But he acknowledges that Roblox has done an amazing job of engaging audiences. “Credit where credit’s due, I remember the first time I put all the game designers in a room to play Work at a Pizza Place when that first launched on Roblox, and I was like, ‘We’re in trouble: here’s why’.

“We didn’t have the tech to be able to do what Roblox was doing at the time. It was a very radical departure, and we were watching Minecraft and Roblox and other games come up and take this audience in a new direction. And we knew that it was like, ‘Hey, this is a changing of the guard for sure’.”

“If you have a platform that has kids on it, it is your responsibility to take care of kids”

He could see that Roblox would eventually take over the world. “But my only issue is, I think as the adults in the room, if you have a platform that has kids on it, it is your responsibility to take care of kids. And I don’t think that is being taken into account enough.”

The US Senate recently launched an investigation into Roblox, saying the platform “appears to prioritise revenue and engagement metrics” over child safety. Roblox began requiring users to verify their age before they can use chat features in January, and in 2025 it rolled out a “sensitive issues” content descriptor. In 2024, it introduced protections that meant under 13s were no longer able to access direct messaging.

Next-generation penguin

Imagine Island was established by asking a question, says MacDonald. “What’s the DNA of Club Penguin that you would take forward, and how would you make something for a new generation that plays differently?”

He says it’s something he’s had in mind for years, but his departure from Electronic Arts in 2023 following the closure of his studio gave him the chance to finally make it a reality. “So I grabbed a couple of my old Club Penguin friends – Sascha Williams, who used to run the Club Penguin studio, and Karin Johnson, who used to run the party team with me – and I was like, ‘Hey, let’s go get some VC capital, see if there’s any interest in going after this market’.

“There was. We were able to raise a few million dollars to prototype Imagine Island and get it off the ground. And then we just started with the idea of safety as the first thing. So how do we moderate? How do we make sure that kids are safe online? [We established] a couple of fundamental rules as a product that we could put in place. And then let’s start testing fun.”

The game sees players creating a custom avatar and then exploring the world, playing minigames, completing quests, and engaging in community-driven challenges, and it has already gathered a sizable audience. “A couple of months ago, we crossed a million users, and we haven’t spent any real money on marketing yet,” says MacDonald. The game emerged from beta in August.

Like the original Club Penguin, Imagine Island is playable in a browser (thanks to a partnership with the web-game company CrazyGames), and MacDonald says there are some IP activations on the way, as well as the game’s first marketing push. “Over the next six months, there’s some pretty aggressive plans,” he says. “This December is the moment I’m waiting for in a real big way.”

“They’re in a protected playground space, and there are adults watching over”

But safety remains the key focus. MacDonald says the game is using the GGWP moderation tool in addition to human oversight. He adds that he sees a lot of potential in AI tools that can flag problematic conversation patterns.

“My number one rule is, are kids safe? That has to be the number one thing. Everything else comes after that.”

“As we’ve developed this world, I really think of it almost like an elementary school where you let people out on lunch or a recess, and they’re out in groups solo, but they’re in a protected playground space, and there are adults watching over to make sure that there’s no bad actors coming in.”

“I don’t think AI is anywhere near what a human with a human’s intuition can do right now. But as we scale, of course we’re going to look at that.”

TTP

Of course, it’s hard to keep an eye on everything. MacDonald notes that Imagine Island features user-generated content (UGC), although the game doesn’t allow players to upload assets, “so we can control what that looks like.”

“But also there’s ways for people to arrange assets in maybe not so nice ways,” he says. “So there’s a lot of moderation of spaces that happens with our game as well.”

Is he talking about ‘time-to-penis’, we ask?

“A hundred percent. This is what I was dancing around, but you got to it much more eloquently than I did.”

He emphasises once again that safety is the first priority. “Then we start to address all these other issues, and kids are going to push the boundaries. And if you’re a parent, you understand very well that kids, this is what they do. As soon as they reach a certain age, they start discovering what their own personal identity looks like. They’re going to try to push against boundaries. They’re going to try, especially in an anonymous place like an online video game, they’re going to try to see what’s allowed and what’s not. They’re going to try some things they wouldn’t dare try in front of their parents or a teacher.

“So there’s a degree of ‘yes, kids will be kids’. But we always do the over the shoulder test. If a parent walked by and said, ‘What are you playing?’, and they’re playing Imagine Island, what would they see on screen? Would it pass the sniff test of a parent? And that’s the thing that we keep in mind. So time to penis is exactly the stuff we talk about all the time, and we try to make sure that the things that we give them don’t very easily make these shapes.”

It’s been a long time since Club Penguin shut down, and MacDonald acknowledges that the world has changed a lot since then. The COVID pandemic in particular negatively affected a whole generation of children. “A lot of kids at a very formative age were packed into virtual [world], and they learned that their virtual presence is as important as their physical one. So virtual worlds actually became hyper important, and you’re watching this with Roblox, [which] essentially became the mall for a generation of people.”

“A lot of kids learned that their virtual presence is as important as their physical one”

But he thinks that the way children play hasn’t changed that much. “Things like Adopt Me [in Roblox], that’s just an evolution of the Puffle system from Club Penguin, almost verbatim,” he says.

So he’s astonished how few games have followed in Club Penguin’s footsteps. “It blows my mind. So I just think there’s a huge opportunity to do something.”

“I think as a game developer, what rests on my shoulders is quite a responsibility. I get to say something to the world, and I really want it to be a positive message. I want this to be a deposit in the world bank, not a withdrawal. If you worked on Club Penguin, if you were a part of that, you’d understand how impactful it was.”

He recalls when the Make-A-Wish Foundation arranged for a child with a terminal disease to come and see how Club Penguin was made. “We drew them as a penguin,” he recalls. Seeing how much the experience meant to them was like a “punch to the heart”.

“I remember when they left for the day, thinking, ‘Wow, this is really, really much more important than a lot of us have acknowledged’. That has never left me – how important video games are, and how important it is that you take it seriously.”