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 popularity of Club Penguin also played a role in Disney's decision to close Toontown Online (as well as Pirates of the Caribbean Online and Pixie Hollow).[1]
Preservation
Toontown Preservation Project
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 obtain professional scans of original design documents and artwork that were delivered to them by Bruce Woodside sometime in 2018.[2] On May 13, 2020, two design documents pertaining to Cog Buildings and doodles were shown in a comment posted by jjkoletar on /r/Toontown.[3]
On May 26, 2021, the Toontown Rewritten Team announced on social media that they would introduce an archive of Toontown Online titled the "Toontown Preservation Project" to celebrate the game's 18th anniversary on June 2nd and share their favorite pieces of the game's history daily.[4][5] The Toontown Preservation Project was released via a separate domain hosted on Notion[6] outside of Toontown Rewritten's website that features never-before-seen Toontown Online materials, such as original design documents and artwork, as well as promotional materials including digital downloads, merchandise, newsletters, trading cards, and websites. It 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
The Toontown Rewritten Team received "Pandora", a nickname they used for this particular archive, as an anonymous donation by a former Disney imagineer sometime in 2019 that is currently not yet released to the public. Some leaks of previously unseen artwork, original game files, and source code were unveiled on /r/Toontown. A notable leak known as "Spotify" is the nickname given to another archive that is allegedly identical to Pandora, which was released by a /r/Toontown user on June 10, 2020.[7] 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.[8]
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.[9] 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
-
The "Closing News" section of Toontown Online's website.
External links
- Toontown Online on Wikipedia
References
- ↑ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gLBchw0ZXus
- ↑ https://twitter.com/JoeyZio_/status/1258593385151168514
- ↑ https://www.reddit.com/r/Toontown/comments/giny0a/any_updates_on_the_documents_from_joey/fqglyw7/
- ↑ https://twitter.com/Toontown/status/1397564465684516866
- ↑ https://www.toontownrewritten.com/news/item/708/introducing-the-toontown-preservation-project
- ↑ https://toontown.online
- ↑ https://www.reddit.com/r/Toontown/comments/h0spk3/happy_17th_birthday_toontown_community/
- ↑ https://www.reddit.com/r/Toontown/comments/iqvtom/some_toontown_source_code_with_original_developer/
- ↑ https://github.com/ToontownRewritten/ToontownReleaseArchive