Beginning in the late ‘90s and lasting into the 2010s, DisneyChannel.com was the ideal destination for Disney Channel fans. (At one point, fans were actually going to ZoogDisney.com instead, but the basic concept was the same.) What began as a place to download photos and videos of new shows and check TV schedules evolved into a virtual hub full of fun, creative, and often bizarre minigames. It wasn’t the metaverse, but for Disney diehards, it was pretty close.

Almost three decades later, as Disney prepares for its biggest push into gaming ever through a $1.5 billion investment in Fortnite-maker Epic Games, Inverse revisits the rise and fall of DisneyChannel.com through interviews with eight developers, producers, and designers who helped bring the experience to life.

If there’s any director toeing the line between batshit and brilliant, it’s Guy Ritchie. The British director is a ball of boundless energy, always eager to bring an irreverent sense of humor and brutish violence to his thrillers about crime and punishment.

Well... almost always. For all his love for a “Hard R” rating, Ritchie is also game to bring his talents to the studio system. He’s cleaned up his act many times before, for family-friendly blockbusters (Aladdin) and glossy summer tentpoles (The Man from U.N.C.L.E.) alike. Sometimes it works — U.N.C.L.E. was a particular high point — and sometimes it just doesn’t.

A gorgeous group of actors can only do so much to bring a flaccid story to life, as Operation Fortune, King Arthur, and Ritchie’s most recent project, The Gentlemen, have easily proven. Perhaps that’s why Ritchie is opting for a slightly simpler story this time around, with The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare. A slightly apocryphal historical remix, Ministry is Ritchie’s best film in a long time.