i'm playing toontown again
if you've never heard of toontown before, it was once an mmorpg for kids owned by disney where you played as a "toon" trying to defeat the evil, fun-sucking, corporate robots known as "cogs" with classic slapstick comedy props. back in the day, it was maybe one of the most popular disney mmorpgs alongside club penguin, but it was eventually shut down when disney did its big mmorpg nuke in the year 2013.
immediately after disney announced toontown's closure, fifteen year old joey ziolkowski began the development of what would later become the most popular fanmade toontown recreation, toontown rewritten. in order to avoid legal conflicts with disney, what was once a game that needed a $9.95 monthly subscription to play is now completely free and rid of most disney references. they don't accept donations and every single staff member is a volunteer developing the game purely for the love of it1. they've added a bunch of new content and battle encounters, streamlined parts of the game that were once clunky and a chore to do, made qol adjustments, and a ton of other things over the last almost-decade to keep the game alive. nostalgia aside, that is maybe the other aspect of rewritten that makes my so heart warm. side note, toontown: corporate clash is another popular fan recreation that completely reinvents the original game!
i first started playing rewritten in 2023 after finding out it existed. i did a 1:1 recreation of the toon i originally made back in 2006/2007: a cyan cat named "little daffodil" pictured above (she's wearing a halloween outfit right now). back then, my parents did most of the playing for me because i was five or six years old at the time i had an account. they completely maxed out my toon (they ended up enjoying the game themselves — they're still friends with the other parents they met at the time), save for some missing fish and golfing/racing trophies. i followed the exact same build my parents did back then too.
the thing with mmos for me is that i personally believe the gameplay experience just doesn't hit the same when you don't have a dedicated group of people to play the game with often. from 2023-2024, i managed to form a small circle of online friends i used to play with regularly, but once life got in the way, we all started logging on to play together less and less and then eventually not at all. however, every september 19th is the beginning of rewritten's anniversary event "cartoonival" that usually gets majority of the player base to hop on again, which is exactly what happened with me. my friends had the same idea this year, so we've been playing all together pretty consistently again for the past few weeks which has been really fun.
this year, i've also managed to rope my real life friends misha and camille into playing with me. i made a new toon so that we wouldn't be in wildly different parts of the game, although it is fun to carry low level toons. i once used an unnecessarily high level attack on a low level cog while helping them out and it was funny hearing them gasp once they saw how much damage i did. a level 1 cog has 6 hp and i used an attack that did 110 damage. it's only been a few days but they don't hate the game (i think), and i'm really glad i get to share a part of my childhood with my friends.
majority of rewritten's player base consists of 20+ year olds who used to play the game when they were kids and it's got me thinking about how most people just don't really care about their kids being on the internet anymore. in the early 2000s, parents were really concerned about children having internet access so toontown has a built-in premade set of phrases that you had to use to communicate if your parents weren't comfortable with you being able to type your own messages. rewritten still has this feature, as lots of the parents on the game introduce it to their kids2. usually you'll know someone is a kid if you don't have the option to talk to them through typing your own messages.
when i was growing up, there was a plethora of websites and games made for kids that i could choose from. aside from toontown, i was a regular on neopets, club penguin, moshi monsters, poptropica, webkinz, pixie hollow, old school roblox and a lot more platforms i'm probably forgetting about. some of these platforms still exist but they're just undeniably unpopular with actual kids. just like toontown rewritten, a majority of neopets users are just people who used to play it as kids and then simply never stopped playing even after they grew up. i don't know a lot of people with children, but i never hear about anyone's kids playing these kinds of games or being on internet spaces that are actually meant for children. kids these just days seem to just free roam youtube and social media? i really don't like accidentally running into twelve year olds on twitter! i'm just guessing, but it's probably because of a lack of profitability, the difficulty surrounding regulating children's spaces, and the invention of the ipad. or something.
it's a bit of a bummer for me to end this blog post on a sour note, so i hope that the 75% of it that actually is happy was enough to make up for it. if you had a favorite kids' space on the early 2000s internet, i'd love to hear about it!
i've been thinking about applying for the team as a graphic designer for years now; maybe this is the year i bite the bullet!!!↩
a majority of players are based in america. i did a boss fight late night american time, and the party was commenting on how smoothly our run was going. somebody joked that it was because all of the kids were asleep. i said "do any kids actually play this game because everyone i've met is at least 20" and then four of my teammates immediately replied "my kid does"↩