Anyone remember fusionfall??
Oh, god, do I ever!
For the uninitiated,
FusionFall was a 2009 MMO co-developed by Cartoon Network and South Korean-based Grigon Entertainment. The game unfortunately went under in late 2013. This promotional artwork says it all, really. The game was flawed (falling into the same MMO trappings as its contemporaries), but I always loved the concept. It was a sci-fi setting with all your favorite CN characters imagined in an anime-esque artstyle, as well as locales taken directly from the various shows from CN's catalog at that point, with an abundance of references to boot, naturally. You were a kid who was (initially) mistakenly transported into a dystopian future in which Fuse (the main antagonist of the game) and his Fusion army have all but won the war. You eventually travel back to the past, do (loads of) tasks to level yourself up, fight Fusions (corrupted, green counterparts) of said favorite characters, get better equipment, and eventually reach Planet Fuse to confront Fuse himself. I can't stress that this hodgepodge of crossovers was
easily the best part of the game. Reminds of those old bumpers of these characters from different shows interacting with each other, something that was especially emphasized in the CN City era.
I miss when TV networks had personality and flair to them.
Not long after
FusionFall's servers were terminated, a highly-dedicated group of fans formed a community dubbed
FusionFall Universe. The goal was to create a revival of the original game, but it was later decided that it'd be split into two separate games: one being in the form of
Retro — a faithfully re-created fan server of the original game being based on a specific update, and
Legacy — a project that was originally created for the same purpose, but instead, was given new life as a built-from-scratch remake, in which the devs would drip-feed info on the game from time-to-time. Here's what this website used to look like:
It was a site where you could catch the latest news on both projects, and, of course, it had its own dedicated forums for community engagement.
The wait for
Retro was... quite something. It was announced on Dec. 2016, but we wouldn't be able to play it until August 1st, in 2017, because of database issues. It took a year and four days just to be able to mess around in the Future Area (which served as a Sneak Peek) with online features and Missions to play. It took another month and a few weeks for the whole game to be playable. Yes. It was that grueling of a wait.
This was a pretty good decision. It allowed the devs more time to focus on
Legacy, and we had
Retro in the meantime to keep us busy... and
then 2020 happened.
Just to remind everyone how
HORRIBLE the year 2020 really was. I was
so close to finishing the game
for the first time. When I first heard about this news, I was dumbstruck. They basically abandoned this series — fans tried to bring it back from the grave, and instead of hiring these hard-working and well-meaning group of game designers, testers, and all-around passionate folk to earn CN some money, they ****ing issue a DMCA takedown?! Seriously, screw Cartoon Network, screw 2020, and screw the rest of this decade.
Toontown Online got its fan recreations in many different forms, one of the oldest being
Rewritten, and it's still going strong
12 years after its initial closed beta. And yes, I understand that the Disney characters were cut to avoid this very fate, but the Playgrounds being named after those characters and the signs depicting their likeness were kept. Both of these projects were non-profit, so all that work and time trying to revive
FusionFall was for not, and I'm still
more than a little upset about that —
greatly.
Oh, and by the way, there was this spin-off/sequel game called
FusionFall Heroes that was released months before the original game's shutdown. I never played it, yet somehow, it lasted longer than the original game. I didn't know where exactly to put this last paragraph, so I decided to just throw it at the end of this post. All this rambling has probably deviated from the OP, but I couldn't just
not touch on this stuff. This was such a grand concept that Cartoon Network could've made some
serious bank on had they actually cared about it. It's something that might've been more successful had it been an offline adventure with some online elements — something that was
strongly suggested with
Legacy, by the way, but I digress.
Back to wallowing in my own misery and spitefulness, I guess.
