![]() It ran for 10 years, from 20, before Disney decided to can the MMO in favour of a shift towards mobile gaming and smaller, Club Penguin -like ideas. ![]() We never expected it to blow up in the way that it did.”Īs the name implies, Disney’s Toontown Online is centered on constructing your own cartoon character and defending the titular municipality from the evil corporate Cogs. “When we began Toontown Rewritten, we thought it would be a small project that might get the attention of a hundred or so people for a short period of time. ![]() While most players spent the final month of Toontown playing as much as they could before the game closed, we raced to get a prototype working to see if our crazy idea could become a reality,” Joey Ziolkowski, a game design lead on Toontown Rewritten, tells me. “The very day after Disney announced that the game was closing, a small group that we had joined were already working on reverse-engineering the game’s client. Entirely voluntary, these projects feature rag-tag teams from around the world making the wheels turn, developing events and content, and running community support for increasingly huge player-bases, all learning the ropes as they go. But in others, fans take a “never say die” attitude, reverse-engineering servers to keep the lights on. In some cases, this is just it, the game is dead and the players go their separate ways. Entire communities are dissolved overnight, suddenly left hanging without the thread that bound them all together. Many MMORPGs that don’t garner the right amount of success are shut down without warning or heed towards keeping a version accessible, leaving only remnants behind. As games move further towards a service model, relying on servers and regular updates for content and access, the question of their preservation is becoming more and more complicated.
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