Club Penguin: Operation Blackout was a masterpiece

Fun fact: we did, in fact, hide "Aunt Arctic is the Director" in Morse code many years before the reveal. So that was actually true. Great video! Nice to see all the stuff in one place like this

I actually first joined Club Penguin during the blackout. I was really confused, and even scared that my penguin would get permanently frozen if i stopped playing for a few days. When the event ended, i just had this sense of accomplishment that i really did help save the island.

When this event happened, I ran into Herbert. He went into another room & then I wasn't able to enter that one or get his autograph background. I sent an email to Club Penguin & told them that my computer died (which was a complete lie). They ended up checking & seeing that I had been in the room with him and gave me the background. 9 year old me really finessed

Little detail that adds up to all this: it wasn't Rookie's mistake of buying so many anvils that the island tipped, it was one of the crabs that tripled the number of anvils in the order, so it was staged from the start to get Herbert out of his cage instead of an accident

This was really a “you had to be there event”. It felt personal, it had weight, it was great

Nothing like Club Penguin would exist today. It was a once in a lifetime entity.

You forgot a tiny little thing: months prior to operation blackout, in one of the newspaper issues, Herbert actually LEAKED the existence of EPF to the entire island, so much so that it made the headlines and all articles were about the EPF from Herbert's perspective in some way or form. And to my child self, who was so heavily invested in the whole secret agent storyline, that was the biggest "oh shoot!" moment of my childhood. Like, in real life I knew everyone knew, but from a role playing perspective, that was huuuge

When Club Penguin shut down, I cried. I specifically remember going over that ending cutscene from Blackout over and over in my head. There will truly never be another game like Club Penguin, and there's not a snowball's chance in hell that any game will ever have an event like Operation Blackout

Fun fact: The EPF started training Rookie to be the new director after Blackout, because Aunt Arctic's identity had been compromised. (AND HE ACTUALLY BECOMES THE DIRECTOR, IT'S REVEALED IN THE FUTURE PARTY)

Operation Blackout was one of the most hype things I’d ever experienced as a child Like, straight off from school I’d hop onto the family desktop, ignoring all my homework that I needed to do because it was more important to stop Herbert than to do my maths and spanish

I never read any guide back in the day, I just accidentally hit the snowball to trigger the secret agent mission so to the young me it feels like I'm actually special and get recruited by the organization. One of my best memory

I was always more afraid of the crab rather than Herbert. Herbert coulda easily been defeated, but that mfing crab always had to pull something

Fun fact: Operation Blackout began on my BIRTHDAY, you can't imagine how shocked / excited I was. I almost felt as if it were meant for me

I think Herbert may have the best Villain backstory ever. The poor bastard just wanted to find a warm beach and accidentally sailed all the way to the south pole! I also love how he introduces himself as Herbert P Bear Esquire and never mentions his law career again.

I think what's awesome, is that a lot of us probably met/walked past eachother as kids in our penguin avatars. So nice to see you all again! Waddling on as ever :D

It’s so crazy to think that I was one of those one million penguins logged on all those years ago. I just remember sitting at my parents big clunky pc seeing the cutscene for the first time and actually screaming when AA was revealed. It was INSANE to my little 10 year old brain😭 soso glad I got to experience this party

Reminder that the “Join the secret agents” sidequest thing involving hiding from the camera and escaping the cage will forever be one of my favorite things I ever did in the Flash era of the internet, especially for a kid who was never allowed a Membership I’m also really glad a lot of things like Blackout were Non-Member-Friendly for the same reason, even if I never got a Herbert Costume hey I was able to get a Grapple Hook and a Klutzy Costume so I took what I could get lmao

Fun fact, this event was so big to 7 year old me I had my mom actually call Club Penguin's support line to ask if I could legally write a book about it. They said no but they did send me a postcard all the way from Canada that I still have. I also heavily considered writing a play about it, and asked like half the kids in my class if they wanted to star in it, leading to my first huge ego boost when I heard people asking eachother if they were in it.

I was so obsessed with this experience, the fact that we get nods to dictatorships in the design, the ever burning fire in the phone building, the freaking lighthouse turned into a hospital! I remember roleplay aiding people who had been hurt, it added so much to this dramatic air of suspense and disaster, little me was thriving in that so much. Oh, and the camps offering food and shelter, the makeshift underground revolutionary base, every place was affected, the progression day after day made it so much more heavy, because they were real life days passing by, waiting for the next mission, uncovering more places in the base, and ultimately defeating the threat. I loved the bleak and scrappy room design in the missions, just everything about this, man.

Why Herbert programmed his massive sun-blocking laser to have a self destruct sequence is still unknown to this day