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The History of Toontown’s SpeedChat (2007)

March 1, 2007 The Untold History of Toontown’s SpeedChat (or BlockChattm from Disney finally arrives) In 1992, I co-founded a company with Chip Morningstar and Douglas Crockford named Electric Communities. We initially did a lot of consulting for various media companies that were looking to leverage the emerging online gaming industry.

Disney had formed a group to look into taking the brand online, including a full-fledged multiplayer experience as early as 1996, when the were considering a product called HercWorld, which was to leverage the upcoming movie franchise Hercules. "We spent several weeks building a UI that used pop-downs to construct sentences, and only had completely harmless words – the standard parts of grammar and safe nouns like cars, animals, and objects in the world." and did some wonderful design work on a giant multimedia 3D kid’s world for Cartoon Network, which ended up being much too ambitious to fund, but I mention it because the project was headed by Brian Bowman.

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