Penguin Chat 3 Launches

Here’s one that many people get confused about… technically there is no “Penguin Chat 3”. It was just Club Penguin before they decided on the final name for the world. For a while they just kept referring to it as “the big update”.

The other key difference is that Penguin Chat 3 was hosted on the RocketSnail website before the team bought clubpenguin.com:

https://rocketsnail.com/blog/2005/03/31/penguin-chat-3-launch

Penguin Chat 3 was like the previous penguin worlds in that there was nothing to download. You would just click Play and you were in! (As long as you had the Flash Player plugin installed in your browser so you could play the swfs, that is.)

Believe it or not, it was Dave who suggested that they focus entirely on penguins. At one point, they wanted to have multiple critters and were considering the name “Camp Critteroo” (since Penguin Chat was inspired by summer camps.)

Fortunately, they found the domain name clubpenguin.com and the rest is history. 🙂

There was very little music in Penguin Chat 3. In the previous worlds, a handful of TAS1000 songs like “I’ve Been Delayed” and “I’m at 9933” were playing in some rooms like the igloo.

Penguin Chat 3 Differences

There were some interesting differences between Penguin Chat 3 and Club Penguin:

1. Ninjas originated here, with a hidden button in the Color Picker interface
2. There was a Construction Site that never appeared again after the switch from Penguin Chat 3 to Club Penguin. Technically it was three rooms, but they were all mostly variations of each other
   1. If you clicked on the sign, you would get a Snowcat vehicle
   2. The yellow Hard Hat item appeared here for the first time, too. And later they would add the “dance or drill but don’t stand still” dance to the Hard Hat item
3. The Town was visually closed off on the left and right, but you could navigate right to the…
4. an empty field next to the Town. This was a placeholder for the future Snow Blasters mini-game that was cancelled
5. There was no Gift Shop yet, even though it was pictured in the Town art.
6. There was no staircase in the Night Club. And of course it was still called a Night Club at this point
7. There was a character named DJ Maxx in the Night Club sometimes. That character was never added to Club Penguin (outside of in the pirate servers)
8. The Boiler Room (which launched in April) looked quite different
9. The concept art needed a change because the original sky color was quite gloomy. The team edited the sky color to make it a darker blue to make the world look more inviting.
10. Once the Club Penguin beta test began, they removed 4 rooms, including the old Boiler Room, the Construction Site, the Snowcat room, and the Building Site.
11. Moderators logged in as Snails. There are screenshots of Happy77 out there as a Snail, for example.