LET'S GET DANGEROUS!

this is my son Ollie and he LOVES when we put plastic bags in the sink like a little nest

these quotes are from Jesse's story about the origins of Toontown Online and how it got started!

"… and i could not have been more excited, not too long ago, when they did the new Ducktales show, there was an episode where Gyro's looking at his notebook, and LOOK WHATS IN HIS NOTEBOOK! he has the cogs in his notebook, and i loved this idea that he had them on the good list and crossed them off and realized 'oops! that was an accident!' and puts them on the evil list. but the whole idea that we created something that is now part of the Carl Barks Duckburg universe and Gyro Gearloose's world, was just something i was really excited about"

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"… one of them are the knock knock doors, which are so cute and fun, but why are they there, why did we put them there, they dont really serve any gameplay purpose. they showed up because, initially … there were all these doors to make the town look like a normal town, like of course theres doors on buildings

and then of course people would run up 'how do i open it?', and we're like 'we cant open all these doors! we cant afford to bank all these interiors, its too expensive' im like 'Felipe, get these out of here, we cant open them, take the doors away'. so hes like 'okay, ill take the doors away', he takes the doors away and now the town looks super weird, its just all these walls, right, we had an occasional door but like walls and walls and walls and walls. we're like 'ugh! that looks terrible, we cant gave doors you dont open, we cant have doors you DO open, what are we gonna do?'

and somebody came up with the idea of like 'well, what if you knock on em and they tell a joke and thats it?', we're like 'oh yeah, of course people want to interact, they dont need to necessarily go in' and we're like 'knock knock jokes are cheap, so like we can, we can do that'"

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"… talking about Lil Oldman, some people may not realize the origin of the name of this character. there was a Mel Brooks movie called High Anxiety, who has this funny character played by Howard Morris … and he plays a character in this named Professor Lilloman, and the joke is everyone always calls him 'oh are you Professor Little Old Man?' and hes like 'ITS NOT LITTLE OLD MAN, ITS LILLOMAN' i dont know, we thought this character was funny and Mike was just kind of riffing on that, so theres like, part of the secret origin of Lil Oldman was in the Mel Brooks movie"

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"its like selling one walkie-talkie, like what are you doing?"

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"… and theyre like 'wait, youre saying this game where kids pay six dollars a month, youre gonna, what are we gonna spend, a dollar a month mailing this out, we're just gonna give them that for like FREE? like a free dollar a month, youre gonna do that, thats the plan?' and we're like 'yeahhhhhh' and theyre like 'noooooo, this is a business, what are you talking about? we cant just give away a dollar a month to everybody, like that doesnt make any sense, get outta here with that'

… so we went back to them and said 'okay okay okay … we're here to talk about a terrible moment, the moment a subscription gets CANCELED' and theyre like 'what are you talking about?' we're like 'okay, we're gonna talk about when a subscription gets canceled, heres how a Toontown subscription is going to get canceled. a parent is alone at night, the kids have gone to bed and theyre paying the bills, and theyre going through the credit card and theyre like WHAT. six dollars a month? WHAT. am i still paying this? does my kid even play this? i dont know if they do, im going to cancel this'"

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"'OH AWESOME, THATS AMAZING'"

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"ill tell you one kind of funny story, so the bad word filter started with me and Greg Wiatrowski, we went out and bought some beer, and we just sat down and started coming up with all the most profane things we could think of, and that was the beginning of the bad list. and it eventually grew to be in i think something like ten different languages? i mean it was like a massive thing, and i think we were the first ones really to do that" - Mike Goslin

"it was so much bigger than that, Mike. Matt took it over at some point and created an algorithm that took Dante's Inferno and figured out what series of phrases in five word chunks would, the likelihood you would find them in that book, and then based on that ratio thats how much we knew whether this was a bad phrase or a bad conversation to flag, and all of that was in every language you were supporting

it was, yeah, so impressive for the time and now i look at what we're doing today and im still like 'Matt built a better one', because it was just, its just unreal and, yeah, but toons on the whole were a wholesome bunch, we were very lucky. sorry Mike, i didnt want to interrupt you there but it was so much bigger than just the original profanity list" - Regine P (Reg)

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"… there was a black-and-white neighborhood, uh, Jesse you know im gonna bring up the vortex neighborhood" - Joe Shochet

"its Toonfest! its Toonfest, getting to interact with the community face-to-face was always the best part, you know its one thing to read all of your messages and emails and hang out on the fansites, but getting to actually talk to people who love this game and want to be together is the best" - Ellen Steuer

"i can tell you my favorite memory by far, and that was the day that Toontown Rewritten opened. because the thing i want to make clear about when, part of what made Toontown special, we had a bunch of people working on it who've been working on Disney theme park stuff, and working on that we didnt think like normal video games, which is like 'oh the game's gonna come out for next Christmas and itll be popular for six months', we thought about 'we're gonna build this and we want it to be up for twenty years, we want people to be playing this twenty years from now'

and ten years later, when Disney decided to close it, it was a super dark day, and we were all really sad, it was incredibly depressing for all of us because our vision of this game being here in twenty years, thirty years, it ended that day. except, that you guys saved Toontown. so, thanks" - Jesse Schell

"ill add one, i mean this happens maybe once a year or, you know, thereabouts. ill run into somebody who will, ill have, i dont know, theyll recognize me or ill have something associated with Toontown, and theyll come up and say 'hey, you know, that was my childhood. like thats what i did, i grew up in that game'

and like, it never gets old, i mean, when people tell you like theyve spent time, and, you know, it was something that really had an impact on them, like thats, that always makes me, you know, its so humbling, like just to have that kind of ability to impact so many people. i mean, and it happens all the time even still, ive run into people and just, you know so many people feel so strongly about something that we worked so hard on and its, you know, its just a great feeling. im sure you guys get that too now, you know, this thing is just going to keep going" - Mike Goslin