The Simpsons Game Finally Returns After 19 Years
There's no doubt that there have been some great gaming releases attached to The Simpsons franchise over the years, with most immediately citing Hit & Run and Road Rage as two of the best. That said, 2007's The Simpsons Game is often remembered less, but there's arguably just as much fun to be had if you give it a chance.
Players take control of all the different members of the titular family, each of whom comes with their own powers, and while the gameplay isn't exactly groundbreaking, the writing and original story are brilliant. Unfortunately, it can be a little difficult to play these days unless you still have your Xbox 360 hooked up, but that could all be about to change in a major way.
As first reported by The Gamer, Reddit user YesterMester shared a post confirming that The Simpsons Game has successfully been brought across to the PC via recompilation.
"This has been a long time coming," the post reads. "I’ve been working on and off, researching video game recompilation, and I’ve now fully recompiled the game’s CPU instructions to native PC code. There’s still a lot of work left and some known issues, but it’s up and playable.
“It was the first game I ever played. It deserves some true love and people don’t seem to care about it anymore. So I will. A lot is planned, but I’m sure everything will be okay.”
It's the Xbox 360 release that has been rescued this time around, and that's a good thing too, as it's probably the best version of the game we ever got. As you might expect, there were plenty of comments supporting the project, with one saying, "I've been waiting for this day... FOR TOO LONG!"
While another added, "I can’t wait until the issues I’m running into works. And thanks for the hard work."
Even more excitingly than that, the project will, at some point relatively soon, offer modding support. That opens up the doors to the creative work of thousands of fans, and we could easily be looking at an entirely new version of The Simpsons Game before too long.
After a glut of games tied to The Simpsons in the 2000s, it really has been a bit of a barren wasteland over the last decade or so (if you ignore mobile releases). It certainly would be nice to see the family return for a new generation of players on more competent hardware (South Park showed how successful that can be), but projects like the one above are probably the best we can do in the meantime.