If you’ve been playing Club Penguin for a while, you may have noticed that the yellow fish that swim in the waters around the island are commonly referred to as “Fluffies”. What’s more, this ironically named breed of fish seems to pop up everywhere—whether or not it actually makes any logical sense for them to be there. Obviously, there’s an interesting story here, so in this edition of spotlight we’re going to take a good look into the history of these special fish.
It may come as a surprise you to that Fluffy wasn’t originally the name of the whole species, but rather just one particular fish. This fish first appeared in a lost poster on the back cover of the first Penguin Style Catalog. The poster revealed not only that the yellow fish answered to the name “Fluffy”, but also that it belonged to Zippo Penguin (AKA Chris Hendricks) who lived at 2993 West Iceberg Lane.
Though this mock poster was intended as a joke, many players thought that it was an actual quest that needed to be completed and began searching the island for the fish. The team quickly cleared things up with the community, but the mistake prompted a tradition of hiding the yellow fish around the island anyway. The most obvious example of this is the Fluffies thrown out the back of the truck in Bean Counters (note that while in the air, they take on the exact pose of Fluffy in the missing poster. This was common with early hidden Fluffies).
The Java Delivery Truck itself actually conceals another two hidden Fluffies, though they can only be seen in artwork as they’re on the front of the truck: one as the hood ornament and a second on the truck’s grill.
If you look closely at the Medieval Banner and Grandfather Clock furniture items, you will quickly notice that these items both conceal the hidden fish, too.
Some more finds include Fluffy appearing as the figurehead on the Ship Igloo, on the sign above the door to the Ship’s Hold in the Captain’s Quarters, beneath the comedy/tragedy puffles in the Stage, periodically jumping out of the water viewed through the Cove Binoculars, and cleverly appearing as a literal easter egg at the Easter Egg Hunts of 2009, 2011 and 2012.
Of course, this is just scratching the surface of hidden Fluffies. Once you know to look for them, they just keep popping up and it quickly becomes impossible to keep track. But why, if there are very clearly certain yellow fish that are hidden Fluffies and others that aren’t, do we just refer to all yellow fish as Fluffy? I don’t know for sure, but I think that this was just a gradual change that occurred behind the scenes – Fluffy’s typical pose doesn’t work everywhere, so sometimes he needed to take on a different pose in order to appear at all.
About a year and a half after they had started hiding Fluffies around the island, the team addressed their little joke for the first time. A challenge was issued in issue #90 of the Club Penguin Times for players to try and find as many Hidden Fluffies as they could.
The challenge also came with an answer key containing the locations of ten Fluffies, however, some of these were actually just regular yellow fish – a hint that the distinction between Fluffies and yellow fish was beginning to fade.
But there’s more to Fluffy than just easter eggs and secrets. The dates are a little sketchy, but it seems that in late 2010/early 2011 a new game was added to the beta team website simply titled “Fluffy the Fish”. In this game, you played as Fluffy himself—the only yellow fish in a tank of grey fish—and ate smaller fish to increase your size while avoiding the bigger ones.
The game actually had a second version that was released a bit later than the first one. This version of the game took place underneath the frozen pond behind the Ski Lodge, rather than in the aquarium, and had built-in levels as well as an indicator of how many more fish you needed to eat before levelling up. Each time Fluffy reached maximum size, the next level would start (in which the other fish would grow bigger more quickly). This version of the game was also impossible to lose, as you would always respawn again immediately after being eaten.
The Fluffy the Fish game never made it past these basic development stages so we never got to see it in game, but there are a few other games Fluffy appears in. Of course, he can be seen in Bean Counters, Jetpack Adventure, and Ice Fishing (as mentioned above), but three yellow fish can also be seen in Aqua Grabber with Fluffy himself appearing in Soda Seas.
Using a worm, you can catch Fluffy and bring him back to the net, which will give you the Get Fluffy stamp.
Fluffy also makes a brief appearance in Card-Jitsu on the “Fluffy the Fish” card. As a yellow four, this isn’t a very good card, but at least it has a somewhat humorous description.
Fluffy also appears in both Super Hero Bounce and every Soda Sunset level of Puffle Launch in the form of a cloud. These clouds were created by the Cloud Maker 3000, as seen at the Festival of Flight and the Puffle Parties of 2012 and 2013.
Fluffy’s next major appearance was at the Penguin Cup (2014). At this party, the four leading Club Penguin sport teams were given proper names and the yellow team was renamed “Team Fluffies”. According to issue #452 of the Club Penguin Times, Team Fluffies is “Creative and surprising. This team dazzles their opponents and keeps them guessing.”
The team’s headquarters (which they used for not only training, planning and hanging out, but also for rehearsing their goal celebrations like the backflip, the airplane and the Aqua Grabber) was based at the Cove, and featured their unusual game-plan of moving in a fish shape to confuse the opponent.
Throughout the competition, Fluffies and Space Squids competitively battled over third and fourth place, but at the end of the party, Fluffies came out on top with 32,644,636 points—beating Space Squids by just one point! Unfortunately, because they still didn’t win over all, Team Fluffies’ trophy was never released, which would have clearly shown Team Fluffies’ secondary colour to be orange. We still can see this on the Fluffies Vuvuzela, Fluffies Face Paint, and in various pieces of artwork, though.
The Penguin Cup wasn’t the only exciting thing that happened to Fluffy in 2014. For some reason this year opened up the floodgates for a plethora of new Fluffy-inspired items including the Fluffy Stuffie, Fluffy Gown and, simply, “The Fluffy” – a yellow fish that you could wear on your head.
Before 2014, there were only three items that were obviously inspired by Fluffy – the Feed Fluffy Trashcan, Fluffy Shrubbery and Fluffy Crest, but there were a few more items that concealed Hidden Fluffies: The Lace Background contains the shadow of a yellow fish,
the Card from Dancing Penguin very cleverly hid Fluffy as a barcode on the back of the card,
and the Silver Watch Medal contained two hidden Fluffies – one in the PSA logo on the front, and another as the second hand on the inside.
Fluffy also has a prehistoric variant: the Saber-tooth Fluffy. These fish still live in some places and can be seen around the island (though not nearly as frequently as the original Fluffy) in places such as the Puffle Hotel Sitting Room, the Hall of the Viking Lords, the Ice Cave on Toughest Mountain, and on Tallest Mountain in Sled Racer.
Both Saber-tooth Fluffies and regular Fluffies also appear in Club Penguin Island. Regular Fluffies are a common prize from fishing at Beacon Boardwalk, worth four coins and seven Rockhopper XP, while Saber-tooth Fluffies are rarer, worth fifteen coins and five Aunt Arctic XP. A few new variants of Fluffy are also introduced through this fishing minigame including the Tropical Fluffy, Clown Fluffy, Silver Fluffy (likely a nod to the grey fish from Ice Fishing), and the Guppy Fluffy.
Over the years, Fluffy has become an icon of Club Penguin and has made well over one hundred appearances, but I couldn’t possibly hope to cover all of these in one post. Instead, I’m now issuing the challenge from issue #90 to all of you: if you find Fluffy anywhere else that I didn’t mention here, leave it down in the comments—let’s try not to leave anything out! Happy hunting, and until next time,
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