Toontown Online, one of the oldest kid-friendly MMOs, has just turned 18 years old. To celebrate, the team behind the Toontown Rewritten private server have announced a massive preservation project that will act as a digital museum of the game's history.
Originally released in 2003, Disney's Toontown Online was a game that let players become a colorful toon and explore the titular town, where they could interact with other players, decorate their own home, and battle evil business robots known as the Cogs with a variety of gags. The game was shut down in 2013, but private servers have been running the game ever since. One of the most popular servers, Toontown Rewritten, is launching the largest archive of never-before-seen Toontown Online history to date with the Toontown Preservation Project.
As explained in the announcement by Brad from the Toontown Team, the Toontown Preservation Project is a mini-site that archives the history of all things Toontown Online that can't be preserved in Toontown Rewritten alone. These assets were collected over the past several years and even included donations from a few of the people who worked on the original Toontown Online. As for the physical material they've gathered, the team pooled their funds to get everything professionally scanned by an archival service. Despite all their work, the effort to preserve the history of Toontown Online isn't done, and they're more than willing to get the help of the game's fans if they happen to be holding onto a piece of Toontown history.
Toontown Online is no longer playable via official means, but you can play it on private servers such as Toontown Rewritten.