People always jump straight to Hit & Run when they talk about bringing back classic Simpsons games, whether that's through ports or full-blown remakes. But I’d argue that The Simpsons Game deserves just as much love, with its whistle-stop tour that takes the family through some brilliant, sharply-written, and self-aware gaming parodies, spanning Grand Theft Scratchy, Medal of Homer, Shadow of the Colossal Donut, and even NeverQuest, topped off with co-op that rivaled the best Lego games.

Thankfully, it’s finally getting its time in the sun, as one fan is working to bring the Xbox 360 build to PC through a recomp. Widely considered to be the definitive edition, the PS3 and Xbox 360 version developed by EA Redwood Shores featured the Springfield hub, time trials, and exclusive power-ups. While it has been possible to emulate this version for some time now, the difference with a recomp is that it runs natively on PC, meaning that it’s essentially a fan-made port.

"Long Time Coming"

“This has been a long time coming,” Reddit user YesterMester posted. “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,” they continued in the comments. “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.”

YesterMester is asking the community to download the game and get testing so that they can collate feedback, ensuring The Simpsons Game is as good as it possibly can be on PC—known issues so far include characters being missing for a few seconds after a level loads, audio crunching, performance dips in certain areas, and main menu UI flickering. If you decide to download the game, there’s a dedicated feedback hub on the GitHub page to flag any issues.

Otherwise, the roadmap includes native GPU rendering, mod support, more patches, and launcher improvements, promising to revitalize this nearly 20-year-old classic.

The Simpsons Game Like Platformer Shooter Action-Adventure Fighting Systems Released October 30, 2007 ESRB 12+ Developer(s) EA, Visceral Games, Rebellion Developments Publisher(s) EA, Visceral Games, Rebellion Developments Engine renderware 6 Images Close
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Genre(s) Platformer, Shooter, Action-Adventure, Fighting Powered by Expand Collapse