Spotlight: The Loft

The Book Room is one of just eight rooms that has been in Club Penguin since the very beginning. Created mainly for the purpose of teaching young players how to read and type, this room also contained the boards to play the multiplayer game Mancala.

Like the other rooms that were added this early, the Book Room suffered from having nothing but empty space in the centre of the room, and not much interesting furniture to play around with. This eventually lead the team to majorly overhaul these rooms several years later.

The Book Room was the third room on the island to receive its major renovation, behind just the Pet Shop and the Dance Lounge. This renovation completely repurposed the space into the Club Penguin Times office, a room that had previously been in an undisclosed location.

This change used the room to its full potential; removing the dead space in the middle of the room while providing plenty of spaces for interaction—including the wanted poster that players could stand behind, the moving newspaper conveyor belt and, of course, several office chairs and desks where players could pretend to work.

But it may come as a surprise to you that this wasn’t always the plan for the Book Room. Initially, the team planned to transform the Book Room into a sort of record shop known as the Loft. This idea was even developed quite a bit, as you can see by the completed (or very nearly completed) room artwork below.

Alongside the room’s new look and name, this redesign would also have come with the new catalog “Tunes and Tales”. This catalog would have come introduced a few new features to the game as it allowed players to purchase music (in the form of records) and books.

Throughout Club Penguin’s run, the igloo music system remained pretty much the same: every month, along with the new furniture catalogue(s), new tunes would be added to the list and old ones taken off. There was no way to save music, or return to pieces that you liked. Once a piece was off the list, the only way to ‘save’ it was to never change your music.

Tunes and Tales would have changed this system significantly. Rather than music being free for anyone with membership, players would purchase tracks that they liked from the Book Room (or the Loft, as it would now be called). Purchased tracks could then be accessed through a menu in the igloo interface and played at any time.

It was also planned that players wearing an MP3000 would be able to listen to their music wherever they wanted.

But records weren’t the only game-changing features. Books would also bring something completely new to the game. Previously, the only place to read books on Club Penguin was the Book Room (hence the name). With the ability to purchase their own books, players would be able to read them in their igloo, too.

As mentioned in the image above, after purchasing your first book, a bookshelf furniture item would be added to your inventory. This could be interacted with to allow you (and presumably others) to read through your collection.

While some of these books would have been classics from the Book Room, there would also be a few new ones, including “How I met Yarr” (by Captain Rockhopper), “Wing It!” (a collection of stories from the game in the newspaper), and a revamped version of Rockhopper and the Stowaway.

Unfortunately, Because the renovation required multiple new features to be created and there weren’t enough available developers to work on them, the Loft had to be scrapped. The idea of having collectible books was discarded and, rather than revamping the entire music system, the team just upgraded DJ3K to Soundstudio so that players could make better igloo music to fit their needs. There are still a few rare places where you can catch a glimpse of what might have been, though.

As I mentioned at the beginning, the Book Room did eventually receive a renovation, though whether this was actually planned, or just a result of players enjoying the room’s party decorations for the first Marvel Super Hero Takeover is up for debate. Let me know what you think down in the comments, and until next time,