How ToonTown Rewritten, a 20-year-old Discontinued Game, Taught Me the Importance of the Stop Killing Games Movement

Before we begin, I want to clarify that I was never against the Stop Killing Games movement — I've always understood why it's important to protect games... or so I thought. In my mind, I always clicked with the premise by thinking about the games I would be nostalgic for, but it never occurred to me how a decades-old new experience could impact me.

Before last week, I had never heard of Toontown Online or the subsequent fan revival, Toontown Rewritten, and I'd be willing to bet neither have you. The MMORPG for kids was originally released back in 2003, and it brought Disney fans of all ages together in a colourful world. It offered character creation, quests, and turn-based fighting.

The premise is quite ironic nowadays: the world is being taken over by corporate robots who are turning everything grey and ugly. The enemies, called Cogs, can be fought off using Looney Tunes–esque weapons — Gags. This means the game was (and still is) full of various anthropomorphised animals, reminiscent of Mickey's gang, defeating corporate members through slapstick comedy.

To put this into perspective, World of Warcraft —the MMORPG that popularised the genre — wouldn't release until a year later in 2004. In 2003, I had just turned 10 years old and was still trying to figure out how to play Snake on my mom's Nokia phone. That is how long ago the title came to life.

Ten years later, on the 19th of September 2013, Toontown Online was permanently shut down. Various free-to-play, private servers kept it alive, and thanks to them, I stumbled across the title at 32 years old.

This was all due to a redecorating adventure that my wife and I were having in Disney Dreamlight Valley. We wanted to revamp the Plaza so that we could add all of Mickey and his friends in it, and we kept calling it “Toontown” because it’s a word we’ve seen in the game’s tags, but neither of us has ever really had first-hand experiences with it.

We both agreed that it would feel best to make an accurate depiction to honour the toons, and going to look for images of the animated town led us into a rabbit hole of finding out Disney had an MMORPG that was somehow still alive ten years after its closure. As journalists and videogame fans, we couldn’t help ourselves: we had to see what it was all about.

I was lucky to log in when the Cartoonival was around — a yearly event that the fans who keep the game alive made up and added. My wife and I spent about two or three hours running around trying to get Tokens and checking out other players' toons! 

Once I was done (and the Sun was up, mind you), I exchanged them for the cosmetics I wanted. I felt a bit guilty for having spent so many hours in an "old and discontinued" game, but I had fun.

To my surprise, I ended up logging in again the next day. This time, I discovered player housing and that you can adopt a (really ugly but charming) pet... so I stuck around to do that, too. There was always something new to try out or a cool feature to work towards, and before I knew it, days had gone by, and Toontown Rewritten began feeling like home. I’ve been logging in every day for almost a week now.

As someone who was a big fan of World of Warcraft back in the day, getting various characters to max level and even spending money to get mounts, I hadn't felt this feeling since, and it’s been ten years. I've looked for it many times, but every game disappointed me.

Toontown doesn't have the best graphics, and the movement is nothing short of painful (my wife actually caught me moving my avatar like one does a car in-game because it's so stiff), the sounds and music are repetitive, the animations are clunky... I could go on. But all these "flaws" haven't dissolved my excitement to log in every day and see what I can achieve next.

Schell Games and Frogchildren Studios (the developers) made a fantastic game, one that I think was ahead of its time. While they were giving kids their very own furnishable "estate" in 2003, World of Warcraft is bringing player housing in 2025. The way the game painstakingly opens up by completing missions to unlock "quality-of-life" changes (like being able to pick up more missions) sounds horrible on paper, but it makes the account progression downright tangible.

I had already given up on finding an MMORPG that I could enjoy because nothing ever clicked with me the way World of Warcraft did. In the blink of an eye, I found this completely unknown game to me that utterly changed my days, sending me into a frenzy of excitement I haven't had in a while.

This is why Stop Killing Games is important. Toontown Online wasn't part of my life when I was a kid, but I can confidently say it made my life better for existing, even though I arrived 20 years too late.

I am endlessly grateful to Joey Ziolkowski and Jeremy Koletar, the owners of the fan recreation, as well as to Disney. Thank you for not letting this game die before I got a chance to try it.