Club Penguin is a game rendered in Technicolor, a digital festival of cartoon penguins waddling around dressed in blue samurai armor or yellow Kashmir jackets, and upgrading their igloos with bumping sound systems and rainbow-washed carpets.
But senior Andy Haden sees the game only in shades of dollar bill green.
“I was always known as the tech guy,” Haden said. “Like, the projector’s not working in class and kids would be like ‘Andy! Come fix this!’”
As his technological career progressed, however, Haden stopped fixing things and started making them — most notably a Club Penguin fan site that supplies players with cheats, tutorials, news updates and a forum to commune with fellow penguins.
The game revolves around a theme of consumerism as players, in the assumed skin of a fully customizable penguin, navigate the virtual, Arctic world, playing mini-games to earn coins and buying the latest clothing.
As of July 2013, Club Penguin had more than 200 million unique accounts, owned mostly by children between the ages of eight and 14, often looking for the quickest way to get as many coins as possible, even if that means stretching the rules.
For many of these avian entrepreneurs — more than 121 million between the summer of 2009 and the fall of 2013 — their search will lead them to clubpenguincp.com.
“A lot of kids will search ‘club penguin cheats’ or ‘club penguin codes’ on Google, and our site, as of 2010-2011, would appear at the top of those search results,” said Haden, who will be studying computer science at UC Davis in the fall.
When Haden was in seventh grade, already an enterprising programmer, he was contacted by Christopher Zeoli, the owner of a blog about Club Penguin, who had been referred to Haden through a mutual friend.
Although Zeoli’s blog had already obtained a “fairly significant following” of over 10,000 views per day, he was limited by the restraints of his medium – WordPress.com, a site that allows users to post a blog to the internet free of charge.
“On WordPress.com, you can’t customize the looks of the blog or add advertisements, and [Zeoli] wanted to monetize his site,” Haden said.
That’s where he came in, transferring the blog to another host site for a minimal monthly fee that allowed the usage of Google Ads as a source of revenue.
With Zeoli supplying content and Haden monitoring the technical side, the two have earned more than $600,000 together since their partnership began in 2009. At one point, the traffic on the site became so congested that the duo had to buy and assemble their own web server, currently stored at a data center in Fremont.
Between his seventh grade and sophomore year, Haden monitored the site, updating content, and even releasing mobile device apps that would allow the then-budding market of iPhone and iPod Touch users to access the site offline.
Two years later, the skills that Haden learned through his experience with clubpenguincp.com have come to benefit the Bark as well.
“I’m responsible for the maintenance and well-being of the Bark website, Bark server, and everything behind the scenes that makes it work,” he said. “All the stuff that I apply to the Bark website and keeping it stable today, I learned while doing the Club Penguin site.”
At first glance, the two websites hardly appear homogenous. However, they are both powered by the same man, and perhaps surprisingly, by very similar technology.
“A lot of time I spent on [Zeoli’s] website wasn’t actually programming or making new designs, it was figuring out how to handle, on our budget, 7 million page views a month,” Haden said. “More than anything, I learned how to get the set-up for a website right, so that it doesn’t fail.”
Haden is leaving the program by preserving the past — what he affectionately calls his, “big project,” — a mass conversion of past Bark PDF files into individual web pages that will act as an archive for alums who want to cite, reflect on, or put their work on a resume.
“We have PDFs of the print Bark going back to 2009, but instead of taking all those PDF files and throwing them online as download links, I actually wrote software this year that converts the PDF into a web page. The advantage of that is it can be searched just like the Bark website can be searched for articles, and it can be indexed by Google, so if someone searches their name, their articles can be found,” Haden said.
Haden’s knowledge reflects a childhood of experience fiddling with computers.
“The internet is a resource. Anything you want to learn you can learn from the internet,” Haden said. “My parents never really limited my computer time, for better or for worse, so from first grade on, I was just on the computer.”
In recent years however, Haden has tried to leave the eight-hour programming marathons and the sleepless, cyborg coder stereotype behind him.
Balancing schoolwork with the time commitment necessary to improve as a programmer would be hard enough, yet he still finds time to get to the gym by six a.m., take bike rides and play the bass trombone for the exclusive SFJAZZ High School All-Stars band. And he wouldn’t drop any of it.
Having already sampled the entrepreneurial road, Haden intends to try his hand in the corporate programming field by interning for Google in the coming years – all the while remembering and preserving the simple enjoyments that turned him to the hobby in the first place.
“I’m thinking of cute stuff that I can automate my dorm room with,” he said amusedly. “Fun little projects like clappers for the lights… Honestly, that’s how I learned programming.
You have to come up with applications for what you’re going to do. Most people hate pointless exercises. Nobody likes doing the rocket word problem in math, but if they can apply it, then it become enjoyable.
