Toontown Online

Toontown Online, commonly abbreviated as TTO, was a MMORPG developed by Disney's Virtual Reality Studio and Schell Games, and published by The Walt Disney Company. The game was released publicly on June 2, 2003, and lasted until its closure on September 19, 2013. Since the closure, many fan revivals appeared over the years, including the most popular fan revival known as Toontown Rewritten that began development as soon as Toontown Online's closure was announced by Disney on August 20, 2013.

Closure

On August 20, 2013, the Toontown community was hit with tragic news about Disney's plan to close Toontown Online the following September. Due to budget cuts and changes in management, Disney shifted their focus towards other online and mobile play experiences, as well as a growing selection of mobile apps. According to Jesse Schell in a Toontown Rewritten YouTube video where he and Shawn Patton answered the internet's most searched questions about Toontown, the growing popularity of Club Penguin at the time also played a role in Disney's decision to close Toontown Online (as well as Pirates of the Caribbean Online and Pixie Hollow) in favor of focusing on developing Club Penguin.

Preservation of Toontown Online's history

Design documents and artwork

In an effort to help preserve Toontown Online's history and due to high demand from the Toontown community, Joey announced that the Toontown Rewritten Team would work towards obtaining professional scans of original design documents and artwork that were delivered to them by Bruce Woodside sometime in 2018. Only two design documents pertaining to Cog Buildings and doodles were shown in a comment posted by Jeremy on /r/Toontown at the time.

Toontown Preservation Project

On May 26, 2021, the Toontown Rewritten Team announced on social media that they would be introducing an archive of Toontown Online titled the "Toontown Preservation Project" on June 2nd in celebration of the game's 18th anniversary and share their favorite pieces of the game's history every day until then. The Toontown Preservation Project was released via a separate domain outside of Toontown Rewritten's website that features never-before-seen Toontown Online history, including original design documents and artwork, which continues to be updated by the Toontown Rewritten Team and with the help of contributions by Toontown community members and Toontown Online developers.

Pandora, Spotify, and Anesidora

Soon after it surfaced that the Toontown Rewritten Team was not only in possession of Bruce Woodside's donation but also in possession of "Pandora", some leaks of previously unseen artwork, original game files, and source code were unveiled on /r/Toontown. Pandora, a nickname used by the Toontown Rewritten Team for the particular archive, was anonymously donated to the team by a former Disney imagineer sometime in 2019 and is currently not yet released to the public. A notable leak known as "Spotify" is the nickname given to another archive that is supposedly identical to Pandora, which was released by a /r/Toontown user on June 10, 2020. The same user returned several months later to /r/Toontown on September 11, 2020, and released yet another archive dubbed "Anesidora", a collection of Toontown Online source code containing developer comments.

Release builds

On October 8, 2020, Joey created the "ToontownReleaseArchive" repository on Toontown Rewritten's GitHub to release a 1.0.5 Beta build of Toontown Online from September 5th of 2001, with all of its files donated by Joe Shochet. Other Toontown Online release builds can be donated and added to the repository. The repository also includes a "Toontown Beta Explorer" tool created by Joey that loads DNA and bam files from the 1.0.5 Beta build for easy viewing.

Gallery

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  The "Closing News" section of Toontown Online's website.

External links

• Toontown Online on Wikipedia