Part 24 of a 25-part series looking back at every Simpsons video game ever made.

I imagine most people don’t note the coming and going of games from digital distribution fronts. If a game appears on Steam or the App Store today, and then it disappears two years from now, it’ll go mostly unnoticed. Such is the ephemeral nature of digital entertainment. …

Part 23 of a 25-part series looking back at every Simpsons video game ever made.

The year of The Simpsons Game was the whirlwind it appeared to be in previous chapters. There was the movie, the first mobile game, The Simpsons Game itself, meeting Matt Groening at the launch party, and all of the crazy luck that went into getting myself involved in my own small way. It was such a whirlwind that by the end, I was kind of… done. Just done with caring about The Simpsons. My last bit of work as a tester on the game ended…

Part 22 of a 25-part series looking back at every Simpsons video game ever made.

I’d unwittingly stumbled into a fandom when I started watching The Simpsons on television, recorded episodes onto VHS tapes, and then found my own particular niche in the form of writing walkthroughs for Simpsons video games and creating a fansite to host those walkthroughs. Somehow, that wasn’t enough, and I got it into my head that I needed to work on a Simpsons video game. I’d already grown up in Inglewood, CA, a suburb just a stone’s throw from Big Hollywood and all the video…

Part 21 of a 25-part series looking back at every Simpsons video game ever made.

The Simpsons Hit & Run pleased pretty much everyone, and while it wasn’t a perfect game by any means, it was certainly the best game to feature the Simpsons in a long time. Upon its release, I felt certain that Vivendi had struck the kind of gold that ensured at least one more round of the same type of gameplay. Perhaps a sequel with a larger, unified map to achieve the kind of open world they’d attempted in the first game? And certainly more types…

Part 20 of a 25-part series looking back at every Simpsons video game ever made.

Life trudged on in 2003. The endless war of our times intensified as the United States and its allies invaded Iraq and ended the decades-long regime of Saddam Hussein, the world was enraptured by the whirlwind romance of Bennifer, and Clay Aiken won the hearts of the nation even as he came in second place to Ruben Studdard on American Idol. …

Part 19 of a 25-part series looking back at every Simpsons video game ever made.

College is a unique and expensive time in a young man’s life. You pay the institution loads of money to ostensibly provide an education that will prepare you for the real world, both in terms of earning potential and molding you into a citizen of the world. But in truth, at least in the United States, it is often just an extension of high school, itself the former source of skills required to live in the world. College ‘kids’ go to class a little more…

Part 18 of a 25-part series looking back at every Simpsons video game ever made.

The year 2001 was a tumultuous one. In the world of video games, the PlayStation 2 had already been available for a year, and Nintendo’s next system — the Gamecube — was due to release at the end of the year alongside a new competitor, Microsoft’s Xbox console. Sega’s longtime presence in the game hardware industry ended that year when they accepted the commercial failure of the Sega Dreamcast and ceased production, abandoning hardware development to focus on software. …

Part 17 of a 25-part series looking back at every Simpsons video game ever made.

Disappointment. Do you remember it, that first sense of something having profoundly let you down? People often do, though we must try our best to forgive them. Politicians make it part of their lifetime vocations. And entertainment, why, I’d say we expect it. Every piece of media, every work of art, has the potential to just bomb and let us down. Something that’s free may not sting, but when it costs money, hoo boy.

Such was the case with my first purchase of a video…