Disney's Toontown Online may have been my first video game love. It's hard to ascertain the timeline for sure compared to the other PC games that floated my way, because it came out when I was five, but it can't have been much more than a year out from release when I saw my mom playing it over her shoulder and immediately decided I wanted a go at it too. I have faint memories of running a real-life version of one of the first new toon species polls in my second grade classroom (and being disappointed when the majority voted for the one I didn't care that much about, which I'm pretty sure was the bear? My mind then was an enigma and your guess is as good as mine). I spent a considerable chunk of my childhood hanging around in the off-topic chat making up Warriors OCs on the Toontown Central forums. It's basically been an inextricable part of my soul for as long as I can remember.
If you missed the memo on what Toontown is, it is an MMO launched by Disney in 2003 (following a beta starting two years earlier) wherein you create your very own wacky technicolor animal and fend off an attempted hostile takeover by a capitalist army of joyless, robotic suits called cogs. (This, combined with its extremely restrictive subscription service model, makes it perhaps Disney's most ironic product of all time.) It lasted for a decade before eventually shutting down in 2013, because (surprise surprise) it wasn't turning a profit anymore and they wanted to turn their attention to the likes of Club Penguin. ...Which they ALSO shut down a few years later.
Like any beloved MMO, however, free alternative servers privately owned by fans sprung up like weeds in mere days following its closure. The most notable of these was Toontown Rewritten, whose popularity persists to this day as a largely faithful reproduction of the game as it would be if it had simply never been canned, preserved in digital amber save for a handful of new features introduced over time and trimming out the Disney characters who used to roam the hubs to keep themselves out of legal trouble with the Mouse. (They have continued to get away with not changing any of the numerous other instances of their likenesses in the decade since, so honestly they probably would've been fine.)
I'd fallen out of it by the time of the actual closure because I had finally been swept up in the greater world of video games and was probably busy obsessing over some Nintendo series. But as aging compels us to revisit the things we look back fondly on, it was only a matter of time before I gravitated towards Rewritten, and from there I just fell into a cycle of coming back to it every few years. But for all my love for the game, I was developing a more nuanced view of video game quality as a whole, and the deeper you get into Toontown's long grind, the more it undeniably starts to show its age.
Rewritten was FAR from the only private server that surfaced in the wake of Online's closure, however. The vast majority of these are in varying states of dead and gone; woe be to Operation Dessert Storm, still puttering on with a userbase countable on one hand after the predictable results of removing the chat filter, and its innumerable ilk. Among the ranks of these lesser-known servers, however, was one called Project Altis. It, too, had its own share of drama—most notably a legal scare when somebody had the bright idea of trying to sign up their free reupload of a Disney product for Steam greenlight—that was met with a restructuring of the team and a rebrand under a new name: Toontown: Corporate Clash.
Clash would go on to become (an admittedly distant) second place as the other major pillar in Toontown's private server scene. In my mind, it was quickly just sort of filed away as "that weird other server I see people mention sometimes". I didn't pay it a whole lot of attention because it was a vague shape that I only knew was not the perfectly preserved memory I was here for, until eventually seeing the Rewritten social team congratulating them on a big update, which put it a little more at the forefront of my mind. At some point within the month or so afterwards I decided I'd sign up for an account so I could give it a shot the next time I got the itch and, come the passing of a few more months, the time had come to test the waters. I expected more of the same old flavor with some new garnishes thrown in; it's still Toontown, after all.
What I did not expect is that they have functionally turned this into an entirely new game.
Don't get me wrong: the skeleton of Toontown Online is still intact. But I feel like it's worth looking at what exactly that skeleton is to really make it set in how much this game changes, especially if you're one of the people who actually needed that little explanation earlier, or you're just one of those in my age demographic whose allegiences fell with one of the other some dozen online games that were all the rage with kids back in the mid aughts.
The basic structure of the game is simple: you had a number of areas referred to as neighborhoods, each consisting of a safe hub called a playground and interlinked by a number of streets where cogs would roam freely (except on the sidewalks). As the cogs couldn't take a joke, your weapon loadout consisted of gags—things like pies to the face and falling anvils, for a total of seven categories that each had their own XP bar and synergized with each other in unique ways—that you'd have a limited carrying capacity for and would need to restock whenever you ran low. You progressed through each neighborhood one at a time and earned things like quick travel access via Toontasks, which consisted of talking to NPCs who did basically nothing except stand behind counters and tell you to go fight cogs, or recover something from the cogs, or rescue street buildings taken over by the cogs. You earned your currency of jellybeans through various activities like fishing and playing minigames, most of which could earn you an extra little bit of bonus HP ("Laff points"). You eventually made it to an endgame consisting of sneaking into the cogs' HQs, infiltrating their facilities and constructing disguises to take on the heads of each of their four departments, who were the only proper boss fights and unique enemies in the game.
This is about the point where Clash diverges.
From the start, this game has sought to expand on the baseline established here; its first introductions were a new cog department (Boardbots, joining the original four of Sellbot, Cashbot, Lawbot, and Bossbot) and a new gag track (Zap, which consists of things that will fry a cog and turn them into a cartoonish pile of soot, synergizing with a new "soak" effect added to the existing Squirt gags). Black-suited cog variants called executives, with increased health and damage, help keep the regular grind of combat interesting by adding a little more variety to the mix. It introduces two new neighborhoods into the progression: the medieval-themed Ye Olde Toontowne, and the existing Acorn Acres expanded into a full area rather than the sort of afterthought minigame zone it once was. Every playground from the original has an adjusted layout and a brand-new street somewhere.
For everything it expands on, it streamlines just as much: most notably, progression has been redone entirely from the ground up with a central taskline, and eschews the mandatory randomly-generated tasks for things like extra laff in favor of a more traditional, centralized character level system. Instead of going through lengthy process of earning animation frames one at a time to unlock gag tracks in a set order, training points are just awarded at certain levels and you're free spend them to unlock them in any order, OR choose to instead "prestige" your existing tracks with special new buffs. Everything about the combat has been massively rebalanced and given new depth. Grind-heavy mechanics have been revamped or removed entirely. Literally all of the dialogue and tasks are completely new. The Disney names and likenesses are scrubbed entirely. Mountains and mountains of quality-of-life features bump it all a little closer to the modern standard. Everything in these past two paragraphs is all stuff they introduced in Version 1.0, five entire years ago, and it has only gotten more user-friendly since.
I went into this more or less completely blind and basically every time I came across something I'd never seen I was delighted, but the earliest it hit me just HOW radical a shift this game would be was when I made it to the end of Toontown Central and, instead of the original "here is a comically long fetch quest and then you get tasks for the second area", I was greeted with and promptly stomped by an honest-to-god bossfight against a brand new, fully animated cog with actual goddamn story cutscenes and modern MMO content syncing. Like, hello??? I went into this expecting interchangeable guys behind counters and you're giving me actual effort put into the presentation?!
As it turns out, unique cogs called Managers were also added to the end of each early neighborhood to balance out the later playgrounds being linked to the Cog HQs, each of which come with their own brand-new mechanics that provide a much-needed breath of life to the stale formula of taking out waves of enemies whose depth begins and ends at "they will make your health go down". The main taskline managers have also been around since 1.0, and in the time since have experienced some heavy reworking, both visually and from a writing perspective.
That major update I mentioned earlier, for that matter, happens to have in fact been heavily focused on expanding the concept of the managers: last November's 1.3 Hires and Heroes update introduced a whopping sixteen of them, two each for every neighborhood as part of the new Kudos Board mechanic. These are Clash's answer to the randomly-generated filler quests making up the bulk of classic Toontown: once you complete a neighborhood's taskline, you can start taking minor tasks to build your reputation there and earn bonuses like permanent gag XP multipliers and discounts. Once you earn enough Kudos XP to reach the next level, you get your rank-up task, and at levels 5 and 10 respectively, it pits you against one of these so-called "new hires".
Every single one of them has more personality than anybody in the original game, and I am not exaggerating.
The Kudos managers were originally teased via an ARG website deliberately styled after a dated html business terminal, wherein players can uncover login information for various cogs to access personal data about each of them: punny real names outside of their in-game titles, employment history, details of their professional relationships with each other, all of which supplement and are alluded to by what we see of them in person. Just about everyone has something going on besides being a neat new challenge and a fun design. It's hard to believe they're all as recent as they are, because the community has practically defined itself around these characters; you can't scroll for two seconds in the official Discord without seeing someone talk about Chip, or Misty, or lovingly make fun of Brian or Graham. It turns out when you take a game that is, almost by design, practically devoid of real characters and introduce an extremely colorful cast of antagonists, that gives people a whole lot more to care about.
The community's enthusiasm is infectious, too—I'm nowhere near the Pacesetter and his nightmare turbo gimmick fight yet, but you can bet I already love that little freak and his scary gasmask flamethrower boyfriend. It feels wild to only now be so invested in the lore of Toontown, of all things, but here I am. There's clearly so much love poured into all of these guys! I can't help it!! Taken to its logical conclusion, one of the April Fools' events opens up the ever-elusive Boardbot HQ... as Boredbot HQ, which consists of just standing there watching the C.O.O. do his paperwork for 20 minutes while he occasionally chats with you about his coworkers, and it's ironically engaging in its own right anyway because I'd love to hear more about the Mouthpiece's knitting club, actually. Give me more of that.
The same April Fools' event, added a month late this year so actually it's MAYpril Fools', ALSO introduced the thing that REALLY made it set in for me how much of a different beast we're rolling with here: for this silly temporary holiday event, they built an entire hour-long, three phase boss fight with flashier presentation and better animation than literally anything Online ever had. High Roller's High Roller is a game show that turns into full-on JRPG endgame material with a song that goes so absolutely nuts you can feel your brain actively melting as you listen to it. It's balanced in such a way that anyone can start playing it no matter their progression and throws a wrench in the way that basic gag mechanics work, recontextualizing the usual rules and strategies into something entirely new. It was introduced like, a week and a half after I started playing and it was a complete gamechanger.
This is all already insane enough as it is, but it's even more insane when you're still adjusting to the way this game is after spending some 20 years used to a game that is, well, 20 years old. Toontown as it was is a product of its time, and it turns out when you're not endlessly chasing nostalgia and aiming to preserve all of its dated design, the world is your oyster. If you have the know-how and a passion to get creative with the things you love, to make them your own, you can do so much more. You can keep that old game as it is or you can nurture it and watch it metamorphose into the coolest casino-duck-piano-robot butterfly you've ever seen.
To think that they put this out mere months after their absolute biggest update and show no signs of slowing down is absolutely wild after watching Rewritten progress at what could generously be called a snail's pace. Clash's next major update is reportedly going to be focused in on going through what's there and revamping what's left of that 20-year-old shell so hard that they're skipping straight to Version 2.0, which is one hell of an exciting prospect considering the game as it is currently is already in a state where it can easily be considered a new game altogether.
In the leadup to the proper anniversary, it even seems like Rewritten is starting to take notes; they very recently ran a panel revealing their plans for the future of the game, and it seems like they're finally dipping their toes into doing something new and different with this old thing. Alongside a new playground and a game-wide retexture project, their other major reveal was that they're replacing the generic old facility supervisors with their first brand-new cogs in the entire decade since the server went live, each of whom have an extended health pool and their own unique mechanics that will finally start to disrupt the stagnant meta. Where have we heard that before? Both teams are on good terms, so it's unsurprising that they'd take cues from each other, but part of me is hopeful that this turns into a friendly arms race to see just how much more fun they can have diverging from the baseline.
The Clash team is making something deeply special here and I cannot wait to see what else they've got in store. If you have any nostalgia at all for Toontown, I cannot implore you enough to check this game out. Check it out even if you don't, honestly.
