Toontown Online (Japan)

» see toontown.disney.co.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

At launch you could not play the Japanese Toontown unless NTT was your internet provider. It opened on 18 March 2004 as content inside Disney BB on FLET'S, a walled garden NTT East and NTT West sold to their own broadband customers, and the name on the sales contract was Walt Disney Japan rather than Disney Online.

Same game, different service. Japan got its own instance of the world, its own client, even its own browser plug-in, an ActiveX control that announced itself as Toontown IE Helper Japanese. How separate it really was only became obvious at the end, when Disney had to tell Japanese players that their toons could not be moved to the overseas version for technical reasons. Two installations of one cartoon, close enough to look identical and far enough apart that nothing could cross.

It cost 840 yen a month including tax, cut to 500 on 30 July 2008, when Disney also opened a free tier you could stay on forever with a level ceiling and fewer districts to walk around. You paid by credit card or with WebMoney, which in practice meant buying a prepaid card off a convenience store terminal and typing the number in.

The gate on this one was a Japanese broadband contract. In 2004 mine was with TTNet in Ankara, which settles the matter before taste gets a vote. The game sat behind an NTT subscription and I did not have one.

~ the dossier ~

~ only if ntt was your provider ~

Disney BB on FLET'S was NTT's attempt to sell broadband by putting things behind it, and a Disney MMO was a reasonable thing to put there. The game was free to everyone until 31 March 2004 while people worked out what it was, then settled into a paid service with a three-day trial, which had become seven days by 2008.

The walled garden died before the game did. Disney BB on FLET'S ended on 30 May 2008, and the FLET'S-only free plan followed on 4 November 2008, with the people on it moved across to the ordinary free plan. Toontown outlived the product it had been bought to sell by a little over two years.

~ a card from the kiosk ~

The payment page is where this stops looking like an American product at all. Alongside the card logos it carried instructions for buying WebMoney at a convenience store terminal, naming the chains one by one with the denominations each of them stocked. Lawson's Loppi and FamilyMart's Famiport were both on the list. A child without a credit card could fund a Disney subscription by walking to the corner and using a machine next to the magazine rack.

Paying members also accrued points in something called the Disney Magic Point Club, which was not tied to this game and carried on afterward.

~ the last fireworks ~

The notice went up on 15 April 2010, signed by the Toontown Online office at Walt Disney Japan. New registrations closed at noon on 31 May, on both plans. The service ended at noon on 31 August 2010, after what the schedule called a final fireworks display, and anyone still standing in Toontown was disconnected.

No refunds, by design. The Japanese terms had always said returns were impossible given the nature of the product. So instead of paying anyone back, Disney cancelled every full-access subscription itself and told customers there was nothing left for them to do. Billing stopped after August. As for why, the notice said only that it was closing due to various circumstances. Nothing more specific was ever published.

The American ending is famous for being a massacre. Disney announced four games on one day in August 2013 and switched them off together a month later. Japan's was the other shape entirely: one game quietly dropped out of a catalogue that was doing fine. The Disney Japan games page that spring ran the closure notice alongside spring promotions and new DS releases, and Disney Magic Castle Online, which had launched in 2006, went on running for four more years.

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