The design of the penguins in Club Penguin were partially inspired by a panel from the American comic strip "The Far Side" that game designer Lance Priebe had clipped from a newspaper. The comic was originally published on June 8, 1994, and depicts a penguin after it slipped on a banana peel in the middle of the arctic plain. According to Priebe, the comic inspired him to use penguins, because he needed a simple character that he could animate for "an experimental project", that being the browser game Experimental Penguins, the earliest iteration of Club Penguin released in 2000.