This interview is dedicated to Lucario564 and Nicko, whom I thank for being my mentors in my first steps in Club Penguin Armies.

KLONDIKE, CP Army Headquarters – After the generally positive comments we received about the first installment of the “Back to the Dawn” series, me and my good friend and CPAHQ Head of History Coolster114 decided to approach more notable figures of 2007 armies in order to bring light in some of the less documented times of Club Penguin Army history. For this edition of the column, we managed to get in touch with a recognized Club Penguin Army Legend who also happens to have founded one of the first armies I was ever part of. The name? Watex, Creator of Watex Warriors.

Many of you may not know Watex (also known as Fever) or his army Watex Warriors (WW), and that’s understandable considering it has never returned since its shut down in 2014. Therefore, before we proceed with the interview, let’s step back and take a look into the history of Watex and his legendary army.

Despite being a 2007 Army Legend, Watex wasn’t really much involved with Club Penguin Armies. In fact, I believe he is the only Army Legend to have been an active member of our community for just a couple of days in only one war, attending only few sporadic events in the following years. However, what he did on that period was so legendary that earned him his Legend status. Watex is one of the most successful Club Penguin bloggers in the game’s history, with his website totally dominating the blog scene in the early years with millions of views.

His path led him to be involved with our community in November 2007, when he approached the leaders of the biggest armies at the time: Army of Club Penguin, Nachos, Rebel Penguin Federation, and the Underground Mafias Army. He scheduled to face all those armies in a series of battles against him and his fanbase, which took place on the server Tundra. Those battles are collectively known as the “Tundra Wars” and started on November 22nd, lasting a few days. The Tundra Wars is known to be the largest conflict to had ever happened in armies till that point, with hundreds of troops attending in both sides. Watex’s fanbase army was titled the “Watex Warriors” and Watex chose an orange uniform for them.

After the Tundra Wars ended, Watex left the army community and his fans decided to take over WW. Dialga80 created the first Watex Warriors specific website (in Tundra Wars Watex’s blog was used) and set the foundations for what was set to become a fairly decent medium sized army in the following years. At this point I have to thank Lucario564 and Nicko, two WW leaders in 2013-2014 period which were my mentors in my first months in Club Penguin Armies, I will never forget either of you <3.

After a bit of research me and Coolster114 were able to contact Watex via email, and we were extremely happy when he agreed to conduct an interview with us!

Watex’s response email.

Without further ado, me, Coolster114 and CPAHQ present you our interview with Watex, 2007 Club Penguin Army Legend and Creator of the Watex Warriors. The interview is barely altered, except from correcting a few grammar/syntactic mistakes.

Hi Watex! So first of all, how did you come to hear about CP armies?

My memory’s a little murky, but Watex Warriors was definitely not the first Club Penguin Army. There were a lot out there already and many of them were kind of amateur. But there’s one or two that were very serious and I could tell they did it very well. You know, they had rules, they had specific costumes, they had meeting places. They coordinated very well and it worked really well. They even had formations, stuff that I’d never seen before. So I can’t remember the name of the website but there was one big one that was like they had legitimate, like green army gear and that was really cool. And yeah, that’s how I heard about it. I didn’t choose to partake when I first saw it because that was a different world and I needed to focus on my stuff and they had dedicated an entire site to making armies.

What do you remember from the great WW vs all armies War?

So the Watex Warriors vs all armies war was something that was quite a while ago. I’m shocked people even still care. I can’t remember if I was challenged or something, but although I had requests to like be part of an army, I didn’t like anything that was too antagonistic and most of the requests were very minor ones. But I think I got a message from one of the very significant army founders or something like that. I can’t remember the specifics, honestly, but something really caught my eye in an email and from there, like it kind of turned into, OK, let’s do a one time army just with my site visitors. So that was very basic and since I had such a large following, like, you know, we demolished the other ones just by sheer numbers. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that we were better than the other armies. I think a lot of the other armies had very specific, you know, formations and costumes and it was already kind of past a golden age a bit for some of them and at one point the ones I’m thinking about with the green costume were super large as well.

How do you feel about WW generations that came after yours? Did you support them?

If you’re talking about like a few other Watex Warrior blogs that were created after I had my little army get together? Yeah. I eventually started to notice a few. And, yeah, you know, I generally supported them and let them do their thing. You know, it was kind of nice that they continued it on so I definitely kind of supported it. I never considered going crazy with the army thing because I had the whole “how to guide” thing going with my website.

Did you ever return/interact with the army community after 2007? If yes when and how?

I kept in touch and I did. I think I probably, you know, went to a few army meetings from others just for fun without any announcement, but it was starting to get past a golden age. After a while and I’m talking like 2012, so like that was pretty early on, I definitely spent a bunch of time on their side just admiring what they did. But they had an army website and I had a “how to guide” website that gave tutorials on Club Penguin. So it was a different focus and I knew I couldn’t juggle both at once.

Why did you decide to turn your fanbase into an army?

I kind of answered that already, but I was basically invited by, I think, someone significant and I invited any other armies to attend as well. And, you know, looking back, our costume was pretty basic. We could have done a lot more to make it more sophisticated.

How did you manage to make a Club Penguin news website with 20 million views?

That’s a long answer, but I think part of it was a lot of hard work, a lot of researching SEO, but also providing the best content on the topic at the time. Another thing was tons of partnerships and collaborations. Back then, getting a link from another blog was huge. So I went to every single blog and there were hundreds out there and I personally formed relationships and tried to get links. It was a lot of different things. Sometimes I was staying up late to be the very first person to post about news.

About how many people attended the War in the Watex Warriors side?

Again, it was such a long time ago, I can’t remember, but I know it flooded out the entire server. You know, at one point I couldn’t get on to the server and there was a specific world and I know at least two or three rooms were just filled with orange.

Who do you think won the great WW vs all armies War?

I think we won. You know, I saw some articles afterwards saying, well, it’s easier for Watex Warriors because he has a huge following and his army scheme is much easier than ours so bystanders can just copy that orange scheme, whereas they don’t have our costume. Well, that is partially true. At the time, I didn’t take any of it to light because, you know, it was a fun get together. I didn’t want it to be anything where one person hated another and back then, you know, things were less drama filled, which I like nowadays on the Internet. You know, there’s always someone leaving a nasty comment.

Why did you choose the server Tundra as the venue for your event?

So the server Tundra had been my preferred server for my blog readers for many years before that event ever took place. It was a little inside secret for anyone who read my blog. I posted in a few of my webpages that, you know, you’re likely to find me on Tundra.

Did you hold any influence in later Watex Warriors generations?

I did not. I may have been invited, but I probably declined. I was too busy.

What is your current perspective on Club Penguin armies? Have your views evolved over the years?

Honestly, from what I heard, Club Penguin got shut down by Disney a while ago, so I really haven’t heard any news from them other than every now and then someone reaching out and saying they somehow figured I was Watex and they had some random question about it.

Would you ever consider hosting a similar event/battle again on Club Penguin Private Servers?

So I didn’t know there were private servers. It really just depends on the market demand and my general feelings about it. If they’re positive or negative, you know, sometimes you there are some crazy, crazy fans, some people that will try and manipulate me out of it. I would say, you know, when you’re doing stuff like this, you do it from a positive angle. You’re not trying to put a negative taste in someone’s mouth. So, you know, there’s been people who have tried to, like, manipulate me into doing it, which just never really worked. I know someone who tried to create a fake social media profile of a hot girl and then use it to try to add me as a friend and all this stuff in Club Penguin and it was just way too much. Let’s keep it positive here. Don’t do anything like that. So, you know, it really depend. If there is like, let’s say, a thousand people or 100 people who really, really like me, and they have a lot of positive memories and they want to relive the nostalgia then yes but it just depends on the situation.

Which army did you fear the most out of all in the War?

It was that one, the one I keep mentioning and I’m sorry, I can’t remember the name of it, but there was a couple armies that were pretty darn large. I mean, they got like a million visits on their website as well, and it was nothing to sneeze at. So one of those armies in their golden age they were, you know, arguably as big as me. But, as I continued my blog, they started to kind of decline for whatever reason in popularity, which was a shame because I definitely admired them.

During the Tundra War, how did you communicate with your fans and troops? Did you use an instant messaging platform, XAT for example, to relay orders? Or did you convey instructions simply on the battlefield, i.e. Club Penguin itself?

So I would say maybe the latter, although it was definitely not any type of sophisticated battle plan or anything. Once again, I viewed it more as a friendly get together so I would respond to people asking me questions or saying hello. The reason I didn’t use XAT or anything like that was because back in those days there was no software like Discord or Twitch, so the closest thing was something like that, which caps out at I think 15 or 20 people in a room max, and, you know, if you have a troll in the room or someone who is hacking the room, that just causes a lot of issues so it wouldn’t have worked. There was no way at the time to really mass communicate to hundreds or thousands of people except through maybe Twitter and at that point, it’s just like, you could, but I wasn’t looking at it as really anything like that, I mean, at least in that situation, most of the rooms were just orange. Like, we saw a few smaller clumps of armed armies but it was just a time and age where, you know, we had more people show up from my blog.

Did you appoint any Second-in-Commands or Third-in-Commands to help you during the battles?

So I think there’s the assumption that it was very sophisticated. Now, don’t get me wrong, I definitely admired the other army websites that did a lot of that stuff and in my mind I was considering it, but my focus was so much on the tutorials and guides and so I didn’t. I would have had to create a second website to manage all that other stuff, which just wouldn’t have worked out.

Did you deploy any specific strategies, or did you stick to the classic old style of snowball fighting?

I think it was just old school, old style snowball fighting.

Watex’s responses were really interesting and to-the-point, and there is a great amount of information we can extract from them. One impressive thing was that Watex kept some contact with Watex Warriors even after the Tundra Wars, even by attending a few events! Another interesting fact is that the Tundra Wars crashed the Tundra server multiple times, which makes sense considering Club Penguin wasn’t owned by Disney then and so didn’t have very powerful servers. It was notable that Watex claims he feared a “green army” the most, which is most likely the still active Army of Club Penguin. Lastly, Watex mentions that he is open in the idea of a reunion with some sort with ex-fans of his blog and army in a CPPS, which is something that would be really cool if it ever happens!

But those are the main points I took out of this interview. What do YOU think? Are there any extra questions about Watex/WW you would like to see answered? Please let us know in the comments below!

Superhero123

CPA Headquarters Advisor

Coolster114

CPA Headquarters Head of History

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