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 in October and I moved onto other, non-Simpsons projects at EA. In hindsight, that winter was kind of a bummer, and part of it was the fact that there was no way to match the dizzying highs of the first three quarters of the year. …

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 game and television production jobs I’d ever want. And while my stint at Vivendi Games was my foot in the door for video game work, it wasn’t quite what I’d hoped. After all, I didn’t just want to work on any video games. …

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 of vehicles, more characters, more locales. More, more, more. …

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 free than they used to be, learning what it means to decide one’s course while accruing mile-high debt and still working a part-time job. …

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 game based on The Simpsons. As I mentioned before, I loved the television show, but didn’t come around on the video games until much later. The way I figure it, I didn’t have the disposable income necessary to bet on a Simpsons game during the 16-bit era, and then didn’t have a PC during the time when Virtual Springfield was in stores. It wasn’t until 2001 — my senior year of high school — when I finally had money and a willingness to buy a Simpsons game based on name alone. I don’t exactly recall where I bought a PlayStation video game in the year our of lord 2001 (likely at the Gamestop in the Fox Hills Mall), but I remember powering through the game’s wrestling circuits, playing in two player mode with my brothers, and realizing, “Oh, this is bad.” …