Welcome to Part 1 of my Video Game Rewind Series where I’ll be looking at the history of The Simpsons in video games. But that’s a boring intro, so let’s do it in the style of Troy McClure for all the Simpsons fans out there…
Hi, I’m David of the Geek Battle Gaming YouTube Channel. You may remember me from such hits as The Weird Versions of Street Fighter Games series, and the Is This Console Still awesome in 2024 and Beyond video series.
In today’s episode, we’ll be deep diving into the world of Springfield and The Simpsons, where we’ll be looking at what many consider to be the best Simpsons game ever made. Welcome to The Simpsons Arcade!
The Simpsons Arcade game is one of the most loved arcade games of all time. It’s also still probably the best game ever to be made based on the Simpsons TV show. That is really saying something when you consider that it was the very first video game based on the Simpsons and it released in 1991 when the Simpsons had only been on air as a standalone show for just over one year!
The game is a side scrolling beat em up, and was developed by Konami who also developed the fantastic Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles beat em up games for arcade, NES and other platforms. So, between that, and the Simpsons Arcade, it’s fair to say that Konami were the top dogs at making the arcade beat em ups, rivalling Capcom with Final Fight and Sega with their Streets of Rage games.
In the game you can play as either Homer, Marge, Bart or Lisa and are on a mission to rescue Maggie, who has been kidnapped by Mr Smithers as she has inadvertently wound up with a diamond in her mouth instead of her trademark pacifier…which is a dummy to us Brits. Smithers, you see, has stolen this diamond for Mr Burns, and through an unfortunate series of events, the diamond ended up with Maggie.
Actually, thinking about this for a minute, Smithers kidnapping Maggie for the diamond may prove t be the perfect motive for why Maggie ended up being the one who shot Mr Burns! Think about it, she wanted the diamond herself, and when she later shot Mr Burns it was revenge for Mr Burns being the one who wanted the diamond, and more specifically it was revenge on Smithers as she obviously figured out Smithers was in love with Charles Montgomery Burns.
This of course, is just speculation on my part, but brings me to a big part of today’s discussion. And I apologise if the following I’m about to get into is more for the service of The Simpsons fans rather than just pure gaming fans, but the plot and content of this game is something that interests me more than just how good a game it is.
You see, as the very first Simpsons game that came out in 1991, this is a super early game in the history of the Simpsons in total. For those who may not know, The Simpsons started out as a series of short cartoons as part of The Tracy Ullman Show. The shorts were a hit and just in time for Christmas 1989, The Simpsons became its own half hour animated sitcom show. It was the first animated show aimed more at adults since The Flintstones, and was a big hit pretty much overnight.
As things are today, there are literally hundreds of not thousands of Simpsons characters that have reoccurred on the show across more than 30 seasons, plus the movie, comics, and of course video games.
But whilst this is a fantastic Simpsons video game that wouldn’t even come close to being matched until the release of the Simpsons Road Rage on the PS2 and GameCube, this isn’t the what you could call a fantastic “The Simpsons” game in 2024. And that is because the game lacks so much in terms of recognisable Simpsons characters, locations, and is so lightweight compared to what the same game would be if it were to be remade today…which by the way, is something I’m very much in favour of seeing happen!
Let’s look at some of the ways in which the plot, character choices and settings don’t make sense for a Simpsons fan from even the mid 1990s onwards.
To begin with, why is Smithers stealing a diamond for Mr Burns? We all know Mr Burns is greedy and Smithers is his assistant, but Mr Burns is a multimillionaire and Smithers stealing a diamond for him is fairly uncharacteristic for Mr Burns motives.
Smithers for some reason also has blue hair in this game. It seems like it took the makers of the show a while to settle on who Smithers was as in some early episodes he looked different to how he would eventually look as a standard. In one episode he’s even black compared to him being white…I mean yellow in all later stories.
When you play as Marge, it’s comedic that she has a vacuum as her standard weapon and carries it around with her at all times. This is based on the simplistic version of the character that Marge is the housewife and therefore only carries around a vacuum.
Also this was the era where everything Simpsons went all in on the idea of Bart Man…even though in the show he’d only been Bart Man for a few seconds. The song Do the Bart Man was big at the time, so whenever a character died they would reemerge as either Bart Man for Bart or a similar superhero persona for the others even though there is no basis for the others have superhero personas at all. This is just an area where if done today, they’d have so much more to lean into than they did at the time this was made.
Also, most of the bad guys you fight in the game are generic gangsters who as best as I can remember don’t have a place in Simpsons history. They look like mobsters and you have to believe if this game was made a couple of years later, they could have at least been based on Fat Tony and his gang.
One problem many beat em up games based on well-known properties has is that mostly you’ll end up fighting generic non characters like this and only occasionally see a well-known character. The Batman Forever beat em up game comes instantly to mind in this regard as you’ll only fight the likes of Riddler and Two Face as boss characters and mostly be fighting clone characters for most of the game. In The Simpsons Arcade this is much the same. There’s either the fat guy with white hair or the skinny guy, sometimes with a hat and sometimes without. You think of all of the characters that are in the Simpsons. If they were to remake this, and find a story reason for why a mob of characters were all attacking you, they could legitimately have every NPC as a unique character who is recognisable from the show.
There are lots of cameos of well known characters in the game but often these are split seconds and then they run off, or just do nothing. Nelson Muntz will give you a sling shot, Moe the Bartender, and Barney appear in level that starts in Moe’s Tavern, Principal Seymour Skinner and Martin Prince show up at one point, and it is worth noting that you do get to fight Krusty the Clown a couple of times…although it then turns out that it’s just the fat bad guy dressed as Krusty. Sideshow Bob is in the game in a minor role and you have to believe that if this was made even a little later he would have made the perfect character to be a boss in the game.
You’ll occasionally fight the rabbit characters from Matt Greoning’s Life is Hell comic strip which is a nice Easter egg, but also shows how light they were on actual Simpsons characters to include at this point in history. A nice reference to these characters at the time is that when Marge gets electrocuted you see her skeleton shows that her tall hair conceals that she is also a rabbit from Life is Hell. Of course, later in the show when Marge either has her hair down or has fears about going bald like Homer. Still, in the early days of the show it was actually considered that Marge being a rabbit was at least genuinely considered.
The boss fights are all ok, but all non-recognisable characters. I did check and the wrestler character Werner von Brawn did appear in one episode of the show, but as for the mobsters, the drunk man in Moe’s level and the Kabuki Warrior, these are just not characters from the show. Then the likes of a big Big Foot or a giant Bowling Ball are just signs that this was early Simpsons. It’s fine that these are original characters, but again, if they’d worked more with the makers of the show to include characters that either had been in the show or would later appear in the show that would have been awesome.
What would you rate this game?
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