Disney Pulled the Plug on This Game in 2013. A Group of Teens Kept It Alive
It was the summer of 2013 when a group of teenagers decided to take matters into their own hands.
Disney had just announced the company was going to shutter Toontown Online, a massively multiplayer online game for children and families in which players become cartoon animals tasked with defending their colorful world from gray, no-fun-allowed business robots.
The prospect of Toontown’s impending shutdown was nothing short of devastating for the thousands of kids who had spent nearly a decade of their lives in this digital world made just for them. It was where they got to make new friends from around the world, develop online identities, and discover early passions for storytelling, art, graphic design, gaming, and computer engineering.
With less than a month before their beloved online world would be shut down, teens like Joey Ziolkowski, then a 15-year-old high school student from Maryland, set out on a seemingly impossible rescue mission: to save Toontown by re-creating it on their own private servers—without the permission of Disney. They’d call it Toontown Rewritten.
“The thought was mostly like, this will be a fun little experiment. We'll learn some stuff. Maybe we'll bring the game back online for a couple months, or maybe a few hundred people will play it, and then either we'll hit a roadblock, or we'll get a cease and desist from Disney, or something will happen. We'll pack up our bags, and it would have been a fun little thing,” Ziolkowski says.
