Disney closed Toontown Online twelve years ago this September, and I have mixed feelings about that

The massively-multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) Disney’s Toontown Online (2003-2013, Schell Games) was shut down twelve years ago this 19th of September. I grew up with it, and so this is going to be a bittersweet nostalgia-tinted retrospective about a game that I wish still existed in its original form. An MMORPG that explicitly catered to children and families is pretty novel to me, and there’s something about the cutesy nature of it that still seems novel now; Disney characters like Mickey, Donald, Minnie and Daisy would walk around the game’s “playgrounds” (it’s a ‘theme-park MMO’, by which each area is another stage of the game), and you could have a house and do gardening and hold parties, and play minigames with friends, including a kart racer held together by the string of early 2000s netcode and internet speeds. This all makes it sound like an inconsequential social game, but bear with me: because the real draw was the killer business robots.

Yeah, it was odd. You played an anthropomorphic animal (a ‘toon’, yeah?) in a cartoon world that had been overrun by “cogs” that wanted to commercialise it and make toons sad (this wholesome game’s version of having a character defeated; losing all of their ‘laff’ - read, health points). Delightfully, you fought back by going out into the streets (or their buildings, factories, and executive offices - think of instances and raids in other MMOs) and throwing whole cream pies at them. At launch, the game’s installer had a cartoon depicting Scrooge McDuck designing, constructing, and then being rebelled against by a Cog. The game itself never acknowledged this lore - I don’t know why! It was good!

The robot designs were so memorable. There were the beaming Bossbot Yesmen and the beaming Sellbot Glad Handers. The cute Bossbot flunkies. The delightfully literal designs of Bossbot Pencil Pushers and Big Cheeses and the Lawbot bloodsuckers. These were inspired designs, and it’s only occurred to me as I get older that Schell Games and Disney were taking aim at themselves. I don’t think I ever really engaged with the satire element as a young person.

As a disabled video game player, the pie-throwing (also piano-dropping and TNT-exploding) street combat appealed to me because it was turn-based. I liked that the meat of the game was careful and strategic (though you did have a timer for each player - up to four - to take their turn in a combat encounter), and so I wasn’t at a disadvantage. You fought the four bosses in real-time (literally bosses - the Vice President, the Chief Financial Officer, the Chief Executive Officer, and the Chief Justice - one of these things is not like the other, but we’ll get to that in a bit), and, as far as I recall, you couldn’t, in the original game (more on your alternatives later also), rebind the controls, so I never ventured very far into the high-level endgame content.

For a time, I never ventured that far into the game at all; for many moons, Disney offered a three-day trial that would prevent you from venturing past, I want to say, the first playground, Toontown Central (a cutesy, sunny city area, with our Lord and Saviour Mickey Mouse in the local park). I would often create new accounts just to play through that all again, throwing cupcake after cupcake and squirting flower after squirting flower to unlock each new ‘gag’ (read: weapon). Disney would later open up an ‘unlimited’ trial, that would let you go to other playgrounds but also still prevent you from progressing past a certain point or doing certain things like going into cog buildings or headquarters. I recall having at least one 54-laff toon at this point. It’s all a jumble in my head and I could be recounting false memories, but I like that it’s a jumble - I like that a game made such an impression on me that I’m still thinking about - and lamenting - it today.

Everything changed when I bought a physical disc copy of the game (that I no longer have, which upsets me) in a local video game shop that came with a 30-day membership code. I was hooked. Here were all these other playgrounds and things to be doing - I could go in the buildings, with other people, interact and succeed with them and feel like an active member of some semblance of society. I could be struck by the industrial-strength earworm that was the cog building elevator music (each building had up to five floors of cogs to defeat). My gosh, this was a time in my life.

I did a little bit of bossing during this time; there was regularly a group called the Cold Callers Guild that would run the first boss, the Vice President, at set times in the day. Their reason for being was that higher-level players would chaperone any players, regardless of stats or ability, through the encounter. There was a kind of wholesomeness to this that I’m grateful for, even now. We would all wait in the crater outside of Sellbot (each boss heads a division of ‘the company’) Headquarters and there’d be regular drops of jellybeans (the game’s currency), useful for buying gags, new preset phrases (the game used something called ‘SpeedChat’ - a drop-down list of dialogue options, which helped it carve out a child-friendly reputation), furniture items, and clothing. When everyone was ready, we’d head in. Not everyone would be guaranteed to make it out, but teamwork mostly made the dream work.

I really enjoyed the community element of it, which seems so explicitly personal and of a time to me - I got friends and family members playing and it was a great way for me to connect with them on a different level than before, and that’s never happened since with, well, anything. As for people online, I didn’t make any lasting friends, but I enjoyed the unofficial guild aspect, and those ephemeral moments of niceness and co-operation.

I ended up with an 80 or so laff toon by the end. I don’t even think I made it to the end in September 2013 - I was also in the midst of love affairs with City of Heroes (also forever in our hearts) and Runescape by that point. I was sad at the time, but absolutely not fully appreciating the loss.

Toontown Online’s decline

Toontown Online would stagger towards its closure. I distinctly remember that, towards the very end but before the announcement that it was being culled, the game was besieged by players using hacks. These weren’t cheats, but designed to disrupt the game servers - filling them full of dummy players so you couldn’t log in, and making the game run sluggishly if you could log in. I can’t remember if I cancelled my subscription around this time, but I do remember playing it less, simply because I couldn’t. It’s perhaps because of all of this that new Toontown private servers supposedly have developers building their own server architecture.

Hints at an additional headquarters, where players would finally face the Chairman of Cogs Incorporated, were never realized. The release of Field Offices, a new kind of Cog building combining real-time minigames with turn-based combat, was curtailed, with only Sellbot Field Offices being released. 

The final playground, Chip and Dale’s Acorn Acres, didn’t receive streets. but a mini-golfing activity, with another achievement system that awarded laff points. Bossbot Headquarters was, strangely, plonked within this mini-golfing area. 

I can’t recount a personal tale of the final day of Toontown Online, soI’ll default to footage from Youtube; players gathered in Toontown Central, and are all chattering away, and then - oop. I feel perturbed that I wasn’t there, a bit like I shouldn’t be writing this because my brain tells me that I can’t have been that much of a fan. But I loved this game so much and that I’m finding it quite hard to write about because, well, gosh, it’s gone, and it’s a sign of the years advancing, and of MMORPGs not really being the dominant business model that they were, and so they don’t really exist? There’s Star Wars: The Old Republic and Final Fantasy XIV, both of which have not held my attention, probably because I’ve no abiding interest in the intellectual properties that they’re based on.

The private server era

After the shutdown, I remember there being a source code leak. and getting a local version of the game running on my machine. It was fun running around with admin commands and being able to max out my character - but lonely. The place was desolate, grey, and quiet. A ‘Cogs win’ scenario. I remember going into a Chief Financial Officer fight (that I had only ever seen irate American youtubers play - ah, Coach Zucchini), feeling confident with my God powers, only to remember that, as a massively multiplayer game, Toontown wasn’t designed for this, and it just felt lonely.

Time passed. Multiple private servers came and went, but when I at last got the bug again and started paying attention, there were two - Toontown Rewritten and Toontown: Corporate Clash. The former, at least at the time seemed like it was trying to be as faithful as possible to the original game, almost keeping it in stasis (not the case as of now thanks to the Under New Management update), while the latter seemed to be trying to build on top of it. 

In the end, I dabbled with Rewritten but got massively into Corporate Clash at a time when everyone was at home legally required to do naff all (though I should have been fully focussing on a university degree instead), ending up with a 130-laff Toon (the max in Online was 137, while it was 140 at the time in Corporate Clash). I found solace in Corporate Clash, but I was also sucked into it on a huge level - really badly caning it. I got through an entire playground (Ye Olde Toontown - new to this version of the game) in one calendar day - that’s not a brag, that’s a shameful confession.

The community element came back at a time that I badly needed it. I found myself regularly running quests and bosses - even taking on the final boss - with the same two players. Corporate Clash would also later add an actual clan system, which I participated in for a while before life got back in the way. My timeline of events here may still be all over the place - the COVID-19 pandemic has really done a number on my perception of the order of events, but I was less lonely for it all during that time, which did motivate me to apply myself to everything else, and now I do have a first class university degree - not worth the paper it’s written on.

Some of the changes made to Corporate Clash I really like. There’s a whole new storyline not built to drag on until the end of the Earth, because it’s not designed to cater to a subscription, as Disney’s legal team will eat these private server owners if they monetize. It’s aimed at people who played the original game, so the difficulty is rebalanced. Actually, that is pretty neat, but has meant that I’ve ended up in groups full of mean people who play it too much and have ludicrous expectations for the rest of us. So maybe I don’t like the rebalancing that much, but that’s more because of the impact that it’s had on the community aspect. 

Some changes I liked on paper but didn’t turn out quite as good. The additional bosses, both behind closed doors and in the streets, were exciting to see - new things to do in this old game I love! - but they were difficult to the point of tedium, and you’d need to offer an olive branch to the mean people to get anywhere. There also just seemed to be too many of these bosses. I logged in the other day, thinking I had the bug again,  and got overwhelmed as to what to do, or which boss I’d want to do, or what the benefits of fighting them were.

Volunteer game development is a delightful, utopian idea, but in this case, it’s an example of fans struggling to understand what made the thing that they love engaging in the first place. Another example of this are the Boardbots - a whole new division of the company that the Cogs run. With this comes new cog designs from the new development team, but they’re not as inspired and miss the satirical point of the originals (calling one ‘Paper Hands’ doesn’t count). 

The one change I do like is that they replaced the Chief Justice - boss of the Lawbots, with a Chief Legal Officer. The Chief Justice was something that never worked - that’s a government position, so, although the idea of the Department of Justice crushing an uprising against their oppressive rule hits a different tone right now, it doesn’t gel very well at all with the stuffy business suits angle. So, the change feels appropriate.

Logging in recently and finding myself wholly unengaged by this thing that has captured my attention and imagination across swathes of my life and my pandemic felt discomforting and depressing. I thought about logging off of my character (a kangaroo - a species also unique to Corporate Clash) for good. I probably have, honestly;  I don’t have the time or patience to entertain the bloated MMORPG that Corporate Clash has become. I haven’t revisited Toontown Rewritten in many yon moons, but perhaps I should see where that has gotten to and see if it’s more accessible than Corporate Clash - less immediately ready to throw everything but the whole cream pie at me.

I’m melancholic. For Disney’s Toontown Online (2003-2013), for my childhood, for literally any of the offshoots to take me back to that point by being as good or compelling. Yes, Corporate Clash did consume my life for a fair while, but everyone’s lives had been left with a vast expanse at that point, so that doesn’t count. Good god, I miss the real thing, and the very specific time period it existed in. I really miss not having worries or cares, or life obligations besides not dying of plague. Toontown is weirdly able to transport me back to being an amoeba.

Can I stay there? Can I have a do-over?