In this episode, Andy, Jo and Emily sit down with Chris Heatherly — former Disney executive, Club Penguin General Manager, and the man who ran the world's biggest kids' playground for nearly a decade. What follows is a candid, fascinating look at one of kids media's great "what ifs."

Chris traces his journey from overseeing Disney's toy business to becoming the custodian of Club Penguin, the safe, customisable multiplayer world that, at its peak, boasted 200 million registered avatars and 300,000 concurrent players. He talks about the early days of the platform, the innovative toy-to-game codes that predated today's digital unlocks, and how a fan-created myth about blurry in-game artwork spawned Card Jitsu — a trading card game that briefly outsold Pokémon at Toys R Us.

But the conversation goes deeper than nostalgia. Chris reflects honestly on why Club Penguin was ultimately shut down in 2017: a combination of the mobile transition (Club Penguin was built by artists who could code, not engineers), Disney's wider mismanagement of its games portfolio, and — perhaps most tellingly — corporate leadership that simply didn't understand the value of community. "I had suits ask me, 'what's the value of community?'" he recalls. It's a question that still stings, given what platforms built on exactly that principle are worth today.

There's also a moving thread running through the episode about what Club Penguin was really for. Chris describes a mission to protect children's innocence in a media landscape that's constantly pushing maturity down to younger audiences. He shares a quote from a focus group participant — a girl who said that at school she wasn't the most popular, but on Club Penguin she could be whoever she wanted — that became the team's north star. That ethos extended to the platform's charity work too, with millions donated through the Coins for Change initiative, and an unusually rigorous commitment to making sure the money actually made an impact.

Club Penguin may be gone, but as Chris points out, pirate servers running the game today have more active players than ever played during its official peak — and a new generation of lore has grown up entirely after his time. The nostalgia is real, and it's earned.

Key Takeaways

1. Community is a product feature, not a side effect. Club Penguin's lasting cultural impact came from genuine human connection — moderators who replied to kids' emails, a team that listened to its audience, and leadership that treated the playground metaphor seriously. Platforms that stripped out those elements to cut costs never managed to replicate the magic.
2. Artists who code build differently than engineers who design. Club Penguin's charm came from its creative-led origins. The comparison with Disney Infinity — a technology-first project — is instructive: one is still talked about with affection; the other isn't.
3. User-generated culture is powerful, and ignoring it is expensive. Card Jitsu, one of Club Penguin's biggest hits, came directly from fan speculation. Disney's corporate structure struggled to understand how a platform could generate its own IP from the ground up — a lesson that Roblox and Minecraft would later prove at enormous scale.
4. Corporate short-termism kills long-term value. The decision to shut down Club Penguin is presented here as one of the clearest examples of a business prioritising spreadsheet logic over strategic vision. Chris left Disney partly because he refused to be the one to close it.
5. Protecting children's innocence is a genuine editorial position — and a commercially sound one. The longevity of Club Penguin's cultural footprint suggests that audiences — and their parents — are hungry for platforms that hold that line.
6. Part two of this conversation continues next week.

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Hi, Andy Williams here.

Now, just a little bit of an explainer on this episode of the Kids Media Club Podcast.

It's a chat that we had with the brilliant Chris Heatherly about Club Penguin and it was particularly packed with insight and detail and lasted a little bit longer than our normal episodes.

So we've decided to split this into two.

Two coming up is part one of the conversation and then we'll be following up on this chat with the second half next week in part two.

Well, hello and welcome to another episode of the Kids Media Club Podcast.

I'm Andy Williams.

I'm Joe Redfern.

And Emily, we have a guest today.

Please introduce our guest.

Yeah, we have a guest, Chris Heatherly, another Disney alumni like me, who is going to get into a topic that came up actually originally on this podcast a few weeks ago, Club Penguin, when I just then spiraled into a massive Club Penguin hole.

But Chris was there for the whole thing and he's done lots more since.

So you're very welcome.

Chris, would you mind introducing yourself?

Yeah.

So I'm Chris Heatherly.

Thank you for having me on.

I've been in games, media and Entertainment for over 25 years.

I was at Disney for 14.

Half of that I ran their toy business, half of that I ran parts of their games business, including Club Penguin, where I was a general manager for probably about seven years in one form or another.

And then I eventually, in addition to Penguin, took over their mobile gaming business and grew that.

Then I was at Universal for about four years and built a games business for them.

And then subsequent to that, I've worked in a variety of startups.

My background really has always been in tech and innovation, so I tend to focus on skating, where the puck is going, which means you either are, which means often you're too early, which I've done a lot, but I've done a lot of things in gaming and media and definitely in the kids media space from my years at Disney and Club Penguin.

So thanks for having me on.

Yeah, it's so great to have you.

And actually that whole concept of was it too early could nearly apply to Club Penguin.

So I went down a massive Club Penguin hole recently.

Obviously it was.

He's not saying Club Penguin hole.

It's giving me the.

It's giving me.

That's your.

That's a you problem.

I went down.

Sorry.

I looked into this in depth.

Is that a better corporate way of putting it?

Putting it recently?

I want to say it really had.

It was adorable.

You had your penguin avatar, you had your house.

It was customizable.

There were worlds that you could explore.

It really had safety at the heart.

I know at my time at Disney there was the team down in Brighton, the moderation team and stuff like that.

So it really had safety at the core.

And it came up in conversation that we were having a few weeks ago and I was looking into it and we were talking about it and looking back, it could have been Roblox before Roblox was Roblox to a certain extent or it could have been Minecraft before Minecraft.

It wasn't Minecraft.

So, you know, tell us a bit about those days, Chris.

Like what happened and what went down.

Well, there's a lot packed into that.

Well, I was one of the first people that I got involved with Club Penguin when I was running the toy business and had been pushing us to do toys that were based on games or interactive, had some games component.

Webkinz is really big to time.

And we made a play for Club Penguin and I met.

I was one of the first people to go up to Kelowna Canada after we bought it and just really hit it off with this with the CEO at the time, like Mary Field.

He's still one of my best friends.

I had a dinner with him just the other week.

So I see him, you know, all the time still.

And you know, I started.

I did the Club Penguin toy line to start and we did a lot of innovative things including putting codes on toys, which wasn't really being done a lot at that time.

Webkinz was sort of doing it, but we did it more at an economy level where you would buy a toy and be able to unlock that costume in the game.

And it was pretty innovative for the time.

And we built a game called Card Jitsu that was very successful with Topps, that was trading card game that for a period of time was outselling Pokemon at.

At Toys R Us.

Admittedly at that time, Pokemon was kind of on a low eb and you know, and.

And we did.

And Pokemon Go.

Hadn't happened yet, but we were outselling them for about, you know, nine months, maybe a year.

So we had a lot of success early on.

And then I.

From the toy side, you know, the founders had made quite a bit of money and sort of had.

Some of them had started moving on and Lane was sort of had the notion that he was taking on more stuff and you know, but eventually probably was gonna, was gonna leave Disney and do his own thing.

And so he wanted to be able to pass his baby off to somebody that he trusted.

And I guess he trusted me and, and you know, so I wound up running Club Penguin.

I actually ran it probably longer than the founders by about a year, but.

But so I.

Sorry to interrupt.

Chris, when was that?

When did you take over?

Then I took over.

And I left.

It's actually one of the reasons I left is because I just, I refused to shut it down.

And you know, I, the, you know, we could get into all of that.

I mean, you know, I just think that for a lot of reasons that I could go into and probably write a book about like, you know, Disney was just extremely short sighted about gaming and, and you know, had made, I think trusted the wrong people and invested a lot of money poorly and you know, kind of bet on even projects like Disney Infinity that you know, were cool but didn't really have the depth that you would think that they would have.

And they just massively overspent on it.

And so it just seemed like everything that Disney did in gaming sort of went sideways at some point.

And you know, our business, the business that I was running, you know, got better and better and we were able to do a big turnaround on it.

But by the time that we, we did that, there just wasn't a lot of appetite for more gaming.

And I think with Penguin, you know, we could kind of talk about sort of why it was ultimately shut down.

But you know, a lot of it was just technology.

It was, you know, there, there was a lot of corporate stuff that killed it and I think that was the biggest driver.

You know, just kind of like short sighted corporate suity.

People who didn't understand how special it was but, and how unique it was, but, but also, you know, just the phone.

Right.

Changing everything.

We never kind of successfully we launched on mobile, but never recreated the success over there.

You know, Steve Jobs killing Flash, like sort of all of those things.

And Club Pigment was built by, you know, a bunch of like artists who could code, not engineers.

So the tech was actually pretty broken and it just got worse over time and trying to run it and grow it and fix it and go to mobile and just all of that and then a bunch of other corporate stuff just sort of collapsed from its own weight.

But yeah, because I feel like there was a door there that was, that was really special.

Yeah.

There was things like the, the Star wars party.

They were putting Marvel characters in there.

Right.

Like that's like a big, that's like a, that's like.

It was a huge commit.

It was a huge online community.

It was a huge online community.

And you know, I mean, we were doing, you know, for a, you know, concurrency wise.

I mean, you know, we were doing, you know, sometimes 300,000 concurrence, something like that.

And you know, if you, if you look at like a game like Resident Evil or something like that's the kind of concurrency that's doing.

So mean.

The problem was that no one understood gaming in those terms at that time.

Right?

It was.

Did that, did that.

Did they also understand, do you think there was an issue with a corporate mindset not maybe understanding building community at that point and the value of community over profits?

I had suits tell me, what's the value of community.

Right?

I mean, right.

What's the value of community?

What's the value of a network?

Can you quantify it?

Right.

And yeah, I was like, well, I mean, look at the, you know, market cap of Facebook.

Right?

Like it's not, that's predicated on community.

It's not predicated on, you know.

Yeah, but you're talking about linear television and film executives and maybe not even that.

Mostly people who like come from, you know, MBAs, who parachute into the strategy group at Disney and you know, never work in an opera as operators.

And all they know how to do is look at spreadsheets.

And so, you know, they're, and, and they were going to get promoted by, you know, cutting us to a million pieces, not, you know, helping us grow and be more successful.

Yeah.

Yeah, it's always easier to cut than it is to grow.

Right.

And so, yeah, without vision or talent will always.

Will always.

You know, and sometimes you have to cut to grow.

Right?

I'm not, I'm not against that.

I cut a lot in club, but

it's understanding what, it's understanding what, what you can cut and grow.

And I think that that requires quite an intimate understanding of what you've purchased.

Really.

It reminds me a little bit of when Rupert Murdoch bought my space and then I think just had no real understanding of the value of that or how to kind of really how to kind of leverage that platform.

Yeah, I'll give you a couple.

I mean, the, the.

I'll give you a couple examples.

You know, I mean, I mean, one thing I want to say that needs to be said is that it.

Club Penguin was like, you know, it's kind of like this, this legend now or this like, you know, kind of like people talk about like Camelot or something, you know, and, and it was all real, you know, like that team.

What I loved about working with that team is everyone woke up every day focused on the kids and making the best play experience for the kids.

And, and we were listening, you know, Lane really trained us all to listen to the audience.

And, you know, most of our best ideas came from the audience.

Like that card jitsu card game I talked about was based on a, like a meme kind of legend that the, that the, that the community came up with around.

There were a bunch of, like, blotchy images in some of the early art and, and the, and the, and it was because our artists were sort of, they had a charm, but they were sort of amateur artists.

Right?

And in the beginning.

And so the, the blotchy kind of things that were like shadows or whatever, the kids started speculating, oh, those are ninjas.

And so when we.

And so ninjas became this huge lore and so we want, when we wanted to create this card game, the.

One of the co founders, Lance, said, let's do the ninjas.

The kids have been wanting this for a long time.

Let's just do it.

And that's where card jitsu came from.

And we did this, you know, funny, silly card battle game and it, and it just took off.

Right?

And I don't think that Disney really understood the, the ability to use a platform to do that without having to, you know, drive it on television or film or whatever, but being able to have a platform to launch new IP and launch new IP like that.

But the, but the audience Was very, you know, the team was very motivated but was really there to keep it safe and to serve the audience.

And to your point about like, do you know what you bought?

And keeping it special, like, we had a huge team of moderators and, but they were also a huge cost center.

And a lot of what they were doing was like, you know, not necessarily.

I mean, a lot of, there was a fair amount of like, there was a fair amount of like going in the world and making sure it was safe and kicking people off or doing inappropriate things.

And it was a whole side to that of like kids, you know, threatening suicide or reporting, you know, sexual abuse at home or, you know, there were all kinds of things like that where, you know, we were constantly working with law enforcement to keep kids safe.

But, but there was a whole other side of it, which is a lot of what the moderators did was respond to kids emails, you know, do appearances in game, you know, do like community building stuff.

And the idea that kids could get a email from a mod was like, oh my gosh, they listen to me, they, they, they recognize me, they sent me, you know, they responded to me.

And that made a lot of kids feel very special.

And so, and I think that as the cost hammer started to sling and you lost a lot of that kind of like, you know, the, the people on the other end who were, who were talking to the fans, you know, maybe, you know, you could say, well, it's not scalable and that, you know, it was a big cost and you know, often a debilitating cost, but it also is what made it special.

And so, yeah, and you know, you know, I still think about, I wish, I wish there had been a way to like preserve all that and get it to the other side of this business, you know.

Yeah, it's.

Hindsight is a wonderful thing, but I think in this case you, you're calling out some things that we know now to be true that at the time the execs at Disney doubted which was ugc.

You just said the audience came up with the idea for Kajitsu.

It was ugc.

Now at the time, the technology didn't facilitate that feedback loop that you can get slightly more immediately now when you've got Discord servers or you've got groups on Roblox, but actually it came from them.

And we know how important that community is and feeling invested in game dev or updates now fast forwarding what, 10, 12, 13 years after it happened in Club Penguin.

So I think that's really interesting, you know, precursor to ugc and a big misunderstanding at the studio exec level of what that means and how powerful that is and how important to users.

But what I really love is something that you said before that I think I see coming back now is these weren't necessarily computer science engineers.

They were artists who knew how to code.

Yes.

And that very often results in something that is much more appealing.

Because if you're a pure technologist and you're just creating because the technology is allowing you to do something doesn't necessarily mean it's gonna be good.

And I. I like the idea that it was the artists that, you know, the difference between Club Penguin and maybe Disney Infinity, which was very much a technology play, but didn't necessarily work, but something that perhaps didn't feel as technologically forward as Club Penguin, but was driven by artists with a passion who had a connection with their audience.

Now we look back at it and we wouldn't class Disney Infinity or we wouldn't look at it with the same.

What's the word that I'm looking for?

That kind of same love as Club Penguin still inspires today.

I was watching TikToks, even now, of people just lamenting the loss of Club Penguin.

No, there's a massive community that still is involved in Club Penguin.

There are.

There are server.

There are still bloggers who blog about or Twitter accounts that talk about it.

There's still.

There's nostalgia videos that come out all the time.

People send to me there.

There are pirate servers that are running today that have more people playing Club Penguin than ever played at the height of Club Penguin.

And in fact, they have their own kind of lore and mythology that's evolved beyond Club Penguin.

I mean, what's interesting is, like, I think, you know, in my brain, like, I think I know Club Penguin because I, you know, helped create a big part of it.

But there's a whole decade or more that happened after my time that happened on these pirate servers that now kids and, you know, and young adults who are still playing Club Penguin online or.

Or, you know, these pirate servers.

Like, there's stuff in those that has nothing to do with what I was doing and lore and characters and things that's lived on.

I mean, and I'm constantly getting.

I mean, you know, you know, I don't think you mind me saying this, like, Logan Paul is a huge fan.

I've gotten to know him because of Club Penguin, and he's a.

He's a huge fan of Penguin and wanted to find a way to bring it back.

Tyrese Halberton the other day, who's a big athlete, Po put out, like, two months ago, tweeted something about Disney really, you know, effed up by shutting down Club Penguin.

And then Tyrese and.

And Logan and I were, you know, were like, cross chatting about it.

Like, they're like.

It touched a whole generation.

And it, you know, for a generation that's sort of like, you think about if you're in your 20s now, which my son, my kids are, right.

And they grew up with me on club.

They were right at that age.

Club Penguin age.

And they grew up with me on.

On running Club Penguin.

And, you know, they're.

They've seen, you know, the, you know, Covid.

They've seen, you know, just a world gone mad, right?

And so Club Penguin is like this for them, I think, this oasis in their heart in a way.

It's like this, you know, this.

This little, you know, island of.

Of.

Of.

Of, you know, of.

Of.

Of youthful innocence.

Right?

And something that.

That Lane and I used to talk about is our job was to protect the innocence of the audience and that a lot of what gaming and culture wants to do is.

Is sort of, you know, is to.

Is to.

Is to sort of push more mature culture on younger and younger kids.

And.

And that our job was to protect that innocence for as long as we could.

And, you know, I'll never forget we had this girl, and I'm blanking on her name.

I can't believe I'm blanking on her name.

But.

But that we did in a focus group one time, and she was like this girl with big kind of coke bottle glasses or whatever.

And, you know, and she said at school, I'm not the most popularist one, but on Club Penguin, I could be who I want to be and people like me for who I am and that.

And we took that clip and we were like, that's really the heart of what we're trying to do here.

And so, like, everyone else, like Moshi Monsters and, you know, everyone else kind of ripped off.

And I have a lot of respect for Michael, you know, and he went on to do calm and, you know, great things, but, you know, he's a billionaire now and I'm not.

But, but.

But he.

But Michael did a great job with.

With Moshi Monsters.

But Moshi and some of those other things that kind of knocked off Club Penguin.

They knocked off the kind of superficiality of like, oh, we're going to have an avatar and mini games and all this other stuff, but they never captured that heart.

Like, I don't think that there's nostalgia for, you know, no disrespect to Moshi, which, which I think was a great competitor, but there's not the same nostalgia for Moshi or for any of those other like a bunch of them that came after Club Penguin that you.

That I don't even remember.

Right.

And I think that it.

None of it had to do with our technology or like our gameplay.

It all had to do with the community in the heart of the product.

Fine.

So you think the kind of, the nostalgia that Sparkle nostalgia arose out of that, the time and place in that community that was brought together as much as, as much as any of the other elements to it?

Yeah, I think it was about giving kids a safe.

I mean, I used to say, like, I run the biggest playground in the world, you know, and so my job is to keep it safe and you know, and, and to keep it fun.

Right.

And that's what we.

And to give the kids something to do.

And you know, every now and then, like, you know, the kid, there was this blogger, Sarah, Sarah April, who was, was always very critical Club Penguin, but she kind of kept us on her toes.

And you know, I remember one time on Twitter that the community was like just dog piling on her, you know, because they didn't like all our negativity.

And I was like, guys, you got to get off her.

Like, I'm really disappointed in what I'm seeing out here because this is not what we stand for.

And, and, and like I would have to be the parrot, you know, like, and the, with, with all these online kids.

And so, but I, but you know, what I found is like, you can appeal to their, to their better angels, not just their worst instincts.

And I think a lot of media just wants to.

Doesn't believe in better angels really or thinks it's like superficial kind of, you know, happy talk.

Like a lot of media is too cynical to actually believe that something can be good.

You know, like, like there's a lot of virtue signaling, like people talk, you know, kind of politically virtue signal or whatever.

And like, you know, like even with our charitable giving, like we gave millions of dollars charity one year, we donated $2 million charity.

And we always did it through this thing called Coins for Change, which the kids would vote with their in game money for.

They would play games, earn money to vote on their charities.

And they were always very, you know, very generous and would, and very egalitarian about it, where they wanted to make sure all the charities got funded to the same degree.

And, and, and as we went, over time, we started to make it more overt where it's like, in the beginning it was like, you're funding it like a cause.

And then over time we made it more clear, like, you're funding libraries, you're funding schools, you're funding playgrounds, you know, and there's, there's, there's, there's, there's kids who, you know, learned or got clean water or.

You know, some of the things we didn't tell people is like, we would fund a lot of the projects like that.

Like victims of childhood, victims of sexual and like, violent abuse in ACT in Africa.

That, that, that were not sexy charities for big corporations to give to because they want to be aligned with, like, feel good kind of causes.

Right?

And even with the charitable giving, like, we had a woman who was completely dedicated to going in all those places and making sure the money was spent the right way and having impact.

Like, we were completely focused on impact and making sure that the kids felt that they were having impact.

And it wasn't just kind of like corporate kind of good washing.

It was like.

And I think that, that, that's another example of a place where, you know, compared to the rest of Disney, like, our charitable giving was like, light years ahead of what they were doing.

Like, Disney was just writing money to politically interested kind of NGOs and stuff and not really making sure if it was being spent well.

And, you know, all this other stuff.

And we were, we were like, on top of it.

And I think that, you know, there's something about, I've gotten very jaded over the years about kind of corporations that, that want to appear to be doing good because I think most of it's a scam.

But Club Penguin wasn't.

And I think there's a lot of people who don't.

And media today especially has just become so hard and cynical that people don't believe you can do anything good.

But you, but you can, you know, if that's your business.

Okay.

And we're going to leave it there.

I hope you enjoyed this conversation.

Please tune in next week for the second half.

It is really worth it, as ever.

Please like and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and we will see you for part two next week.

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