But now, bodnjenie & teamtsto have come together to keep the game alive by hosting their own server! In their words, "Teamtsto is building a community-driven private server. Our goal is to ensure fans of The Simpsons Tapped Out can continue enjoying the game they love."
And not only can you still play the game on iOS and Android, you can also search for a backup of your town and import that town into your new fan server account! Their web interface is sleek and simple to use, allowing you to manage the town before you hop in and keep playing.
Check it out at https://teamtsto.org/ if you're not quite ready to let your Springfield go to the big server in the sky.
Hit & Run as it was meant to be played
27 Apr 2025
The Donut Team community is a subject I haven't delved into much but they deserve all of the attention and appreciation. I will go ahead and credit this community for keeping The Simpsons Hit & Run in the popular consciousness as they mod the game in some wild and amazing ways, even employing mods to use the game as the basis for games that have nothing to do with The Simpsons.
But now, after 22 years, a modder named TheNachoman180 has achieved the most amazing feat I could've dreamed of: the vanilla experience in a fully connected map! The fully connected map, or FCM, has been around for a while, but this work by TheNachoman180 unifies various projects into a single FCM experience called Full Game Plus. The mod has all of the various disconnected maps from the original game united into one map, with all of the missions and side quests intact. The developers originally hoped to have a giant map but could not achieve it at the time, and now it's real! I've played through the whole game this way and it's jaw-dropping how much love and details went into this project.
Thanks to DerekRuns for this glimpse at the new map
Bart vs. Homersaurus - Playthrough of the LCD handheld simulation by Itizso!
21 Dec 2024
Itizso does it again! Watch as I do battle against the mighty Homersaurus.
Bart vs. My Hopes and Dreams now available on Amazon!
15 Dec 2024
Just in time for the holidays, my book "Bart vs. My Hopes and Dreams: Looking Back at Thirty Years of Video Games Based on The Simpsons" is now available as a paperback and ebook on Amazon! Check it out.
The end of the finger era
11 Nov 2024
I would be remiss if I didn't post an update here about the impending annihilation of the universe.
... the Tapped Out universe, that is.
EA has announced that The Simpsons Tapped Out, which ran for almost thirteen years, is shutting down. They removed it from app stores back on October 31st and the servers will go away on January 24th, 2025. So uh, late news is better than no news? But hey if you're reading this then you probably already downloaded the game at some point, so you can still spend some time burning through your donuts.
I wasn't always positive about the game (grumble grumble exploitative cash grab), but I did play it and do have some fond memories of using a hacked version of the app to cheat all the donuts in the world. Unlike James Coco, I didn't go mad after fifteen minutes. (Maybe twenty.)
Bartman and Cupcake Crisis LCD handheld simulations!
24 May 2023
Itizso continues the good work of bringing back those LCD handhelds we all took for granted decades ago. These Simpsons games and more are available at: https://itizso.itch.io/retrofab.
Emulation heads know that The Simpsons Bowling, an arcade game from 2000, could never be properly played outside of an original arcade machine. The problem is that no emulation app could get it to run with the voice clips intact. So you could play it, but without voice clips it’s missing a major reason to even play through as all these characters.
Jumping to the present, Arcade1Up released an arcade reproduction cabinet with both The Simpsons Arcade and The Simpsons Bowling installed, including all voice clips! Players dug into the code recently and discovered that the game is running on a custom version of DuckStation, an emulator for PlayStation games, because the arcade hardware was apparently based on the original PlayStation. It’s kind of wild. You can see footage here of someone trying to emulate the game with the standard version of DuckStation. As it says in the video description, “As far as i can tell this is THE only version of this game that runs with the sound clips from the announcer and characters unlike MAME which can't even play them back.“
Something that I’ll throw out into the universe is if someone from Disney/Gracie Films wants to have a complete collection of every Simpsons video game ever made for a nice display case in the lobby, I can be persuaded to trade the complete set for tickets to a table read.
That includes not just each game, but every single port of every single game. Amstrad CPC players, eat your heart out.
