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.
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.
