Club Penguin Rewritten, a remake of the popular online game Club Penguin, has been officially shut down for infringing on Disney’s copyright.

The original Club Penguin was shut down by Disney in 2017, with the company citing ‘lack of interest’ in the IP.

A year later, a project — officially titled ‘Club Penguin Rewritten’ — began, backed by a team of independent artists and developers.

This remake was an exact replica of the original, excluding Disney’s paid membership, in which the mods worked to uphold its status as a safe place for children to play online. Club Penguin Rewritten was known to have the same censorship and rules as the original.

Players would get banned for swearing, talking about inappropriate topics, or sharing personal information.

As of 2022, the game had hit a player count of 11 million.

On Apr. 12, 2022, it was announced through their Discord server that Disney had filed a copyright strike against CPRewritten and requested that the game be taken down.

“CPRewritten is shutting down effective immediately due to a full request by Disney,” wrote Thorn, an administrator and owner of the remake, “We have voluntarily given control over the website to the police for them to continue their copyright investigation…”

Three people were said to have been arrested that same day for “distributing materials infringing copyright”. However, those people have reportedly been released.

In an interview with Gizmodo, in-game moderator BigChun said, “Of course, running a game like this costs money. Therefore ads were placed on certain parts of the game [in summer 2020]. We, or at least I, assume that’s how Disney got us.”