Why the world needs a Club Penguin successor – that isn't Roblox

GamesIndustry.biz reports that Stephen MacDonald, a former Disney senior manager and Club Penguin production lead, is now steering Magic Potion Games toward Imagine Island, a spiritual successor to the defunct Flash MMO. The pitch is straightforward: bring back the social, avatar-driven playground that many developers remember, but rebuild it around modern moderation and child-safety systems instead of hoping a general-purpose platform can fill the gap.

MacDonald argues that Roblox is not a like-for-like replacement because its audience and design DNA are different. Club Penguin was built for kids first, with heavy live moderation, chat filtering, and behavior nudges that quietly blocked unsafe language while steering players toward acceptable interaction. He says that approach mattered because the game was accessible on almost anything, including low-end PCs, and that broad reach was part of why it worked so well.

Imagine Island is aimed at children aged 6–13 and is being developed with live moderation and age-appropriate safety features as core systems rather than afterthoughts. Magic Potion Games has backing from Square Enix, 1AM Gaming, 1Up Ventures, and Konvoy Ventures, and MacDonald says the team has also leaned on veterans including Bungie founder Alex Seropian and Club Penguin co-founder Lane Merrifield. The game already has a sizable audience in testing, though exact numbers and launch timing haven’t been disclosed.

For developers, the interesting part is the product thesis: safety, moderation, and onboarding are being treated as foundational gameplay systems,...