Do you all remember Toontown? That Disney MMO from the early 2000s that shut down back in 2013? I never played it myself but those who did insist it was a very fun time. The game’s premise had you create a disney-esque animal avatar and go around the various areas to fight corporate enemies known as Cogs who want to suck away all fun. People played this game for nearly a decade and made many friends playing it.
They enjoyed it so much in fact that not very long after the original game shut down it had been archived in a playable state as Toontown Rewritten. Over time the creators of Rewritten have managed to keep the spirit of Toontown alive with limited time events and quality of life updates that have persisted to this day and promises of more such as a Field Offices feature that took forever to come out.
Toontown Rewritten has managed to gain a massive userbase of nearly 2 million players, an impressive feat for any game let alone a fan server revival of one. However, Toontown Rewritten actually isn’t the focus of today’s article. Over the years many other Toontown fan servers have opened, and many have closed due to overambition but that subject of today’s has persisted. Today I shall be speaking about a fan reimagining known as Toontown Corporate Clash.
While other ongoing Toontown projects like Rewritten aspire to be as close to the original game as possible, Corporate Clash has decided to expand upon and change the original game. Adding new mechanics such as a new “zap” gag (gags are attacks for those unaware with Toontown)
Other new changes made to Corporate Clash include: A new type of enemy class called Boardbots, changes to the designs of existing enemies to be more modern and HD, and having the Disney imagery of the game has also been completely washed away, giving Corporate Clash an identity all of its own.
However despite all of this Corporate Clash has had difficulty attracting a playerbase. Because players would have to create an entirely new character to begin Corporate Clash many chose to just stick with the game they knew and continued playing Rewritten. Compared to Rewritten’s impressive 4,000-6,000 count Corporate Clash only had a peak player count of between 100 and 600 for most of its existence.
I personally have known about Corporate Clash for a few months now because of a friend who was playing it, but I hadn’t paid it much mind until November 18th 2022. While most of the world was paying attention to Pokemon Scarlet & Violet, I watched as not only this friend, but most of my friend group logged onto Toontown Corporate Clash for the V1.3 update. The update that changed the game forever.
Before we talk about the update itself, I need to mention that there was an ARG that revealed more info about the contents in the weeks before the update’s release. By doing specific actions in game players would obtain a username and password to an actual website for the villains of the games. Players who completed this ARG would be awarded a folder full of memes that if they weren’t included in an official dev folder, I would assume were fake
Even stranger, within this meme folder there was an entirely separate folder that included official lore about several bosses who were being added in the new update, most notably Rainmaker and Pacesetter.
The original Toontown had only 4 bosses and they were all taken down in action fights with a specific gag as opposed to the game’s true turn based combat. This update raises that number significantly! 16 entire bosses were added. This massive of an expansion is uncommon for paid MMOs, let alone free ones.
The content of these boss fights are insane as well. Not only are each of them actual fights that require strategy and teamwork, but some of them have cinematics before them with actual cinematography never before seen in any Toontown material. Some of these bosses have gimmicks that wouldn’t feel out of place in a game like Undertale.
In particular I would like to highlight the Rainmaker fight, seeing her boss fight is the whole reason I decided to write this article. Not only is this our first fight against a sympathetic cog, but the boss fight also has multiple endings, actual cutscenes like mentioned above, and even emotional piano music near the end. Something like this was unimaginable for Toontown a month ago.
This update has done wonders for Corporate Clash’s player count as well! In the week it came out the game hit an active player count of 1,500 several times! This deluge of content was exactly the hook the game needed to attract players who had previously only played Rewritten and even players who never touched Toontown before!
I have no idea what the future of Toontown Corporate Clash holds, the past few weeks have proven to me that trying to predict what this game will do is impossible. I am truly surprised no other site has attempted to write about this game’s bizarre history, after all the original Toontown was owned by Disney. You’d think there’d be more eyes on this. I know that for the foreseeable future I’ll be keeping a close eye on this game and how the playerbase responds.
Nice write-up. Crazy amount of dedication from a team made up of entirely volunteers. So much new short and long term content, I’d say Corporate Clash is shaping up to be a pretty solid unofficial squeal of sorts.
Do you have a link to the ARG meme folder mentioned in the article? I haven’t been able to find it anywhere online. Would love to see it.