Matt Selman, writer and executive producer on The Simpsons, and writer on The Simpsons: Road Rage: Wait, Mr. Burns bought up mass transit? That was the plot? I don’t remember any of this. I remember Hit & Run a lot better, but the way this kind of thing normally worked is that they’d come to the writers and say “Do you want some extra money?” Then we’d have to write like, 20 lines of Homer being happy and 20 lines of Homer being sad. I remember there being a joke about Moe landing on his hemorrhoids — that’s the most vibrant memory I have of this game.
Arcade1Up Announces The Simpsons Arcade... Sort Of
16 Jun 2021
Actual news about a new (old) thing!
Arcade reproduction maker Arcade1Up had several new games to announce at E3 2021, including a new release of The Simpsons Arcade with a very conspicuous trackball. There is an unknown game included and the trackball kinda gives away that it's going to be The Simpsons Bowling, a game that hasn't really been playable outside of the rare and aging hardware from twenty years ago. I'm more excited for that than anything else!
But then Arcade1Up pulled down the listing. I can only guess at some oopsy on their part in announcing this before they meant to, but unless something really goes awry we can expect it later this summer.
Bart vs. My Hopes & Dreams: Looking Back at Thirty Years of Video Games Based on The Simpsons
10 Apr 2021
Big day! The retrospective I wrote last year is now a none-selling ebook, but you can help change that. I'm offering the ebook on itch.io for a optional nominal fee, and it's been updated to heck and back. It's great to finally see it out in the world and here's hoping we see a physical edition someday.
Retrospectives galore
18 Oct 2020
I finished a couple of big projects recently that are worth checking out if you want to know about every dang Simpsons video game.
For a short synopsis (under an hour), watch the Brief History of Every Simpsons Game Ever. It's a platform-by-platform look at every version of every game, which means you'll learn about both Simpsons games and all the wacky consoles and PCs that have been popular in the last thirty years.
If you're in the mood for a longer, more meandering journey, check out Bart vs. My Hopes & Dreams: A Retrospective, which is a novel-length exploration of the twenty-five video games in the series. It's part retrospective, part memoir, and full of details about the games from myself and the bunches of creator insights that I've pulled together. Click on Retrospective up in the nav bar to read it.
That's gonna be it for a while. I'll pay the bills, keep the lights on, and check email (noiselandco at gmail dot com) when I can. Stay safe out there!
The story of Virtual Springfield, the Simpsons walking simulator that spawned a tourist attraction
09 Oct 2020
Virtual Springfield always stood out as Fox's singular attempt to go it alone as publisher of a Simpsons video game. It was a big swing, and apparently a big enough project to bankrupt the original developer. As revealed in the excellent retrospective over at PC Gamer, we should be glad that it survived at all:
"We were downsized and downsized and then ultimately shut our doors," Viner remembers. "But Digital Evolution bought the contract for Virtual Springfield. Around that time, it was like the dot com boom and everybody was everything. They had a lot of projects. They were very legitimate; but they didn't have a gaming division."
Been a slow time around here. Truthfully, I've been feeling burned out on Simpsons stuff. The current state of the world doesn't inspire me to goof around with Simpsons video games. I reckon I'm going to finish writing my retrospective series by the end of the year and then decide whether I want to pitch to online publications. I may just post it here and at the Tumblr site so I can move on to other projects.
That sounds dour, doesn't it? It's probably just the summer heat. I can't do computery things when it's hot. But hey! I'm still posting semi-regular updates in my Brief History video series. We're finally getting out of the 8- and 16-bit doldrums and into the era of chunky polygons. Exciting!
In the meantime, I've also posted a couple of interviews I did for other sites a long time ago. The Internet is a fickle beast and I thought I should back them up here. You know, the sick fascination with one's past, in spite of the cringe.
For starters, I'm far more active on Twitter than here in the news section, so stop on by for the social media goods.
It's been a busy and eventful year between my day job and the work I've been doing as part this Simpsons video game project... thing. I've been releasing a (mostly) biweekly video series that briefly explores every platform on which a Simpsons video game has been released, and I've also been working on a book about Simpsons games. My goal is a chapter-by-chapter look at Simpsons video games from the series's 30-year history. It's still early, but promising!
Aside from that is the work on this website which will go on forever at the rate I've been adding tasks for myself. This site will be mobile-friendly someday, I swear it! At the very least, I renamed it (again) to simply call it NOISELAND.co and finally added the search bar I've wanted to get in here for years. I've got some content to add to the site, including details about the Simpsons slot machine that I was lucky enough to find during my time in Las Vegas back in August. That stuff may appear before the end of year, but it'll be bits here and there over time as usual.
The show may hit its 30th anniversary this year, but 2020 marks the 30th anniversary of the first Simpsons video games, with The Simpsons Arcade showing up in early tests at arcades in Chicago in December 1990. It's a big year for all this stuff I've been cultivating since 2002. We'll see how we can do it up.
The Simpsons @ E3 2019: Whole Lotta Nothin'
30 Jun 2019
Well that was an interesting chat with Matt Selman, Carolyn Omine, Jeff Westbrook, Rob LaZebnik, and Stewart Burns, especially if you like Tapped Out. In fact, the only announcement was that another update is on the way for the game:
But there were a few other interesting tidbits:
The developers of The Simpsons Hit & Run weren’t originally going to include the ability to get in and out of cars, but the Simpsons staff pushed for it to be added as a feature.
The Simpsons writers began writing content for a party game à la Mario Party consisting of mini games, but it wasn’t considered a good idea and EA dropped it.
Matt Selman is confounded by the fact that The Simpsons Hit & Run has a bigger following than The Simpsons Game.
“The essence of Tapped Out is how can we insult Tapped Out as much as we can.”
Watch the whole thing:
The Simpsons @ E3 2019
11 Jun 2019
Some staff from The Simpsons are going to host a talk about The Simpsons and video games at the E3 Coliseum on June 11th from 6 PM to 7 PM PST. This is a streamed event that you can find on any game website. It looks like they’ll dive both into the real world games we all loathe and love and some references to the video games in the show.
