Club Penguin and its developer were purchased by The Walt Disney Company in August 2007, but three months beforehand, reports had circulated that AOL and Sony were also competing to acquire them. Around the same time in June, the game held its first cross-promotional event with the Sony animated film Surf's Up, which also featured penguins. The content added was a surfing minigame and generic beach-themed areas and items that for the most part were already being planned as is, and did not implement Surf's Up characters into the game world. This came in stark contrast to the "takeovers" the game would do following the Disney buyout, which would often introduce non-penguin characters from other Disney properties into the game world. At the time of the Surf's Up promotion, the development team was apprehensive about crossover content, as they felt it would break the immersion of the game. A shell necklace was added as a wearable item during the promotion as an indirect reference to the necklace given to Cody by his idol Big Z in the film, but the team was adamant that it should be a generic item and not have not have the "Z" etched onto it.