Joe McGinn, lead game designer for The Simpsons: Hit & Run, has publicly voiced his support for a remake.
“I would love to see it… Hit & Run is still the highest-rated Simpsons game ever made, according to Metacritic. And if I sound proud of that, yeah I am a bit. I am very surprised and pleased that people still love the game,” Joe McGinn told GamesRadar.
“I gave a talk to some high school kids about my computer science career the other day, and I was amazed that some of them had played Hit & Run. They weren’t even born when it came out!”
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For those of you who somehow managed to evade this 2003 cultural milestone, Hit & Run – which was pitched as “Grand Theft Auto (GTA) for kids” – essentially allowed you to wreak havoc all around the fictitious town of Springfield as various iconic characters from The Simpsons universe. So yes… “GTA for kids” is a pretty accurate description of the classic PlayStation 2 title.
McGinn added: “As game developers, the key concept we saw in GTA was exploration. Not only exploration of the game world, but of a possibility space. It may seem obvious now, but it was revolutionary then: GTA was one of the first games that gave you the freedom to solve a mission how you saw fit.”
“While we didn’t have the richness of gameplay mechanics to offer the same level of freedom, we embraced the principle. For example, I remember one debate about whether you should be able to drive any car, even the boring NPC cars. The publishers thought players should only be able to drive the carefully modelled character-cars. We were able to argue that this was a case where the gamer’s freedom should win: every car in the game is drivable.”
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But despite the growing interest in seeing the beloved video game’s 21st-century revival – in line with the ongoing industry trend of mining nostalgia (see: above) – and the fact a handful of motivated individuals such as Youtuber “Reubs” is currently remastering the damn thing himself using the Unreal Engine 5 (see: below), Joe McGinn doesn’t have the benefit of any insight regarding how likely an official The Simpsons: Hit & Run remake might be.
It also doesn’t help that both the original developer Radical Entertainment and publisher Vivendi Universal games have both permanently shut their doors in the years since.
Here’s to hoping.
