In the years after its closure in August 2013, fans unofficially reopened Fusionfall with two separate versions: Fusionfall: Retro, the base game with no frills, and Fusionfall: Legacy, a new version rebuilt in modern Unity. More branding-heavy than Toontown, Fusionfall had you actually live among the characters of Cartoon Network’s roster, hanging out with Johnny Bravo, Courage The Cowardly Dog, Kids Next Door and so on. Toontown’s story echoes that of Cartoon Network’s Fusionfall, initially available from 2009 to 2013. Toontown Rewritten is now maintained by a team of over 80 working every day to ensure the comfort of their night-two-million-strong players.
“So many fans checked back every single day for months to read these updates and just get a little glimmer of what was going on in the Tooniverse, as well as hope that one day they’d be able to play again.”
#FUSIONFALL LEGACY BETA UPDATE#
One of the key things that led to our success was the introduction of ‘Daily Alpha Updates’, where we aimed to release a game update every day, no matter how small, with a little in-universe story attached to it on our blog that anyone could read,” Ziolkowski explained.
“In the first month of that Alpha phase, we quickly realized just how big this project was becoming. Demand was higher than expected, queues of up to one week being reported during testing as prospective residents flocked to the new-old Toon-universe.
#FUSIONFALL LEGACY BETA FULL#
Alpha invites were released in waves, leading to a limited Beta, and eventually full release. Using various downloads and other bits and bobs freely available, the group managed to pull together a client that let players chat and play a single mini-game, slowly building outwards from there. Given the announcement was made a month ahead of time, a seamless transition to the new Toontown wasn’t feasible, but Ziolkowski and his friends still managed to have a version in Alpha a few months after. 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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