As I’ve written many times at TheGamer,the game I most want to seeis a new game aboutThe Simpsons. Not stuff for its mobile cash cow Tapped Out, not Bart inFortnite, not evena remake of Hit & Run- a proper new game. I know it wouldn’t be all that great (evenHit & Run isn’t as good as you remember), but I love The Simpsons and I want a game with them even if it’s a bit rubbish. And I just can’t shake the feeling that we might be approaching an era where it can finally come back.
I don’t mean for The Simpsons specifically. I have no idea what the future holds there; it’s still churning along with renewals and rakes in a healthy amount of profit through general merchandise and its multiple theme parks. Tapped Out may have forcedEAto tap out of its ambition to create new games in Springfield, and it is no longer at its cultural peak. However, even if the dream of another Simpsons game is dead, it seems like others can rise in its place.
I’d also really love a game thatembraces the individual magic of Disney moviesand ties them all together. No,I’ve never heard of Kingdom Hearts.
Once upon a time, tie-in games were everywhere. Like a McDonald’s Happy Meal toy, any movie worth its popcorn had a short and usually pretty wonky video game adaptation. But as the quality of games improved and development cycles lengthened (not to mention became less predictable and way more expensive), we saw fewer and fewer of these ugly little gemstones. Soon it was only kids’ movies that could get away with unambitious games way below the standards of the era, and shortly after that, they stopped altogether.
And yet in another sense, they live on. For very little kids, you have your Peppa Pigs and your Blueys, while Nickelodeon seems unaware that this era ever went away as it churns out SpongeBob platformers that feel right out of the early ’00s. But more than that, we’re seeing an increased reliance on bringing IP from out of gaming into the gaming sphere, and while this is often criticised as a lack of original ideas, gaming is a unique medium that can tell stories like no other artform.
The Simpsons Game 2 is unlikely to be a pixelated Ibsen, but I go back and forth on exactly how I feel about gaming embracing other media. On the one hand, I think transforming art into IP content reduces the value of its characters, be that through mixing them all together in something likeMultiVersusor Fortnite, or treading water through a live-service battle pass storefront that disincentivises character development likeSuicide Squad: Kill the Justice League.
Several Movies Have Inspired Video Games Recently
On the other hand, games have intrinsic artistic value. We don’t consider it to be a lack of creativity or the death of art when a theatre company adapts a novel and while, again, The Simpsons is not Ibsen, it can show a lack of respect for what video games are capable of to deride them as automatically inferior to the source material.Alien: Isolation, GoldenEye, andTelltale’s The Walking Deadall highlight ways games can build on movies or television with a fresh perspective.
Right now, we seem to have embraced the idea that a movie tie-in does not need to arrive when a movie does - we don’t forget about these worlds the moment we leave the cinema, after all. In recent years we’ve hadGuardians of the Galaxy(clearly based on James Gunn’s movies more than the comics), RoboCop: Rogue City, andAvatar: Frontiers of Pandora, while we haveIndiana Jones and the Great Circle,Jurassic Park: Survival, and A Quiet Place all on the horizon. Video game adaptations are becoming less opportunistic and more based upon connection to the franchise, as well as the obvious need to make money.
I don’t know whether there’s a studio out there that has the rights to The Simpsons, has an emotional connection to the series, and has a boss who believes the idea can make money. I hope there is, and I hope that idea is not ‘let’s sell ‘em Hit & Run again’, although I am a big enough sucker to buy it. But whether we actually get another Simpsons game or not, I’m glad adaptations seem to be coming back, and are now less concerned with making it for opening night.
