Getting banned from Club Penguin is now a competitive sport

Speedrunners have found their new favorite game: Club Penguin. But players aren’t just jet-setting from igloo to igloo at record speed; they’re actively getting themselves banned as fast as possible.

PC Gamer first picked up on the trend, which has exploded in speedrunning communities over the course of the week. The Banned from Club Penguin subreddit, which formed as a place for deviant players to share their funniest ban stories, is currently overloaded with videos from record-setting successful attempts at getting booted from the kid-friendly online multiplayer game.

User ButtonWalls seems to be the originator of the trend, according to a highly popular Reddit thread. His speedrun seems slow in comparison to some recent accomplishments, but when he posted a video of him getting kicked from Club Penguin in just under two minutes, fellow subreddit subscribers went wild.

The whole video runs one minute, 54 seconds, which is just enough time for ButtonWalls to get in and get right out of the online game. How’d ButtonWalls lose their Club Penguin privileges? They broke a cardinal rule by repeatedly typing “fuck” into the game’s chat bar. That’s a big offense in Disney’s online world, which skews toward the preteen crowd.

A hefty portion of ButtonWalls’ run, which has racked up more than 700,000 views since Feb. 19, is devoted to him registering a new account. Somehow, that makes seeing him lose that new account all the more entertaining. That’s a major part of why players latched onto the stunt — they were convinced they could do it faster.

There’s now a “Banned” category for these unique Club Penguin speedruns on Speedrun.com, which accounts for world record runs for a variety of games in a ton of different categories. Based on that site’s leaderboards, the current time to beat belongs to Canadian speedrunner 2KRN4U, who managed to get their Penguin privileges revoked in just 39 seconds. (He’s since bested his own time, with a new video showing him losing account access in 37 seconds.)

Yet the Banned from Club Penguin subreddit already has some faster times on display, including a run that lasts 29 seconds. Granted, user Kevin Y used some special tools to help out, but that just goes to show how obsessed some players are with setting new records in this wild new event.

Club Penguin’s getting an interesting second wind late in life, as the game is set to shut down in its current iteration within the coming weeks. While Club Penguin remains open for now, it will close down on March 29, ahead of a total revamp. Club Penguin Island, a mobile-focused version of the browser-based massively multiplayer online game, will launch after its predecessor closes down. We’ll be curious to see if people find a way to get banned quick in that version after it launches, too.