“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.
Today, Toontown Rewritten has more than 2 million registered users, with an average of 50,000 monthly users and 10,000 daily users. Ziolkowski, now 26 and a professional game designer, is still part of the team of volunteers keeping the game and Toontown community alive and growing.”
Disney Pulled the Plug on This Game in 2013. A Group of Teens Kept It Alive | WIRED
https://www.wired.com/story/toontown-online-kept-alive-11-years-toontown-rewritten/
Toontown Rewritten
https://www.toontownrewritten.com/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XRSFvwlEEP4