Aidan Strong's TEXTURETOWN runs Toontown's source code with the assets of three other dead MMOs

My first impression filed this one as a mashup, which undersells the method. TEXTURETOWN is a bit of a new game wearing old skins. It's also Disney's Toontown Online, running on the original source code, with each sensory channel transplanted from a different dead MMO: text from Club Penguin, sound from Pirates of the Caribbean Online, textures from Cartoon Network's FusionFall.

Aidan Strong, a resident at the UCLA Game Lab, calls the result an “amalgam MMO” and places it in the lineage of glitch, machinima, and assemblage. The itch page is honest in the best way about what that produces: a world that resists understanding while remaining, technically, completely playable.

All four source games were early-2000s children's worlds that Disney and Cartoon Network eventually switched off, and their remains mostly persist as wikis, private servers, and YouTube eulogies. Strong's move is to make the ruins walkable—preservation practiced as collage rather than restoration, which is arguably the more honest account of what actually survives. Rock Paper Shotgun ran a feature calling it a Frankenstein's MMO and slotting it into a wider wave of videogame collage.

The Game Lab is a standing beat around here—we profiled founding director Eddo Stern and toured the lab itself—and TEXTURETOWN reads like the lab's thesis compressed into one object: games as material, not just medium. Free on itch, Windows only.