My Take on the History Of Club Penguin

hi GuizRulez here with my first blog

(dont forget to like!)

in 2008, i started playing club penguin for the first time

In 1999, Lance Priebe, the third of the three CP founders, starts up an online gaming business called RocketSnail Games

in July of 2000, A very early online multi-user communication program called Experimental Penguins, developed by Lance Priebe, first appears on RocketSnail. This chat program is a very early functioning prototype of the future Club Penguin service.

September 15, 2000

Experimental Penguins wins its first award, the Cool Site of the day

September 30, 2000	The RocketSnail website mentions that in the last month Experimental Penguins has received more than “25, 000 visitors spending an average of 20 minutes each” using the game.
July 2001	Experimental Penguins goes offline due to growing traffic to the game and costs related to bandwidth.
July 2001	An updated version of Experimental Penguin gets its own website. This new version of Eperimental Penguin is renamed Penguin Chat.
January 2003	Public testing of Penguin Chat begins.
2003	A recent article I came across which mentions when the three founders from Club Penguin came up with the idea for the online business: “The seeds of the idea for Club Penguin were planted when Lane Merrifield, Dave Krysko and Lance Priebe got together in 2003. Prior to that, Lance Priebe had been developing web-based games in his spare time while working for Dave Krysko at New Horizon Productions, a corporate video and multi-media production company. When New Horizon Productions hired Lane Merrifield as a sales representative these three innovators saw a unique business opportunity. Merrifield, Krysko and Priebe combined their business, creative and technical skills to come up with the idea for a kid-friendly social networking site that they would let their own children use without worry.”
April 2004	RocketSnail develops a kids’ safe version of Penguin Chat for the company KidZap
January 2005	New Horizon Productions launches its new website as New Horizons Interactive (NHI). Projects found in their portfolio include two orthographic room building tools, a component often found in online social networking experiences. One tool for designing a wine cellar and another for building a park. The New Horizon office comtinues to be located in Kelowna, British Columbia and the NHI “start up” receives no venture capital financing.
October 24, 2005	The first Club Penguin site is launched through NHI.
May 2007	NHI begins discussions with a number of companies to find a strategic partner who would acquire Club Penguin and provide support for even greater expansion of the Club Penguin service. Press announcements report that NHI made $60 million in revenues from CP for 2006.
June 22, 2007	The RocketSnail website closes.
August 1, 2007	Disney and NHI announce that Disney will be acquiring Club Penguin for $350 million in cash and an additional $350 million in earn outs if Club Penguin hits certain performance targets by 2009. It’s announced that Club Penguin has 12 million registered members and has over 700, 000 paid subscribers to its service. Also announced is that Club Penguin expects to make $35 million in profit off revenues of $65 million within 2007.

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