The Simpsons: Hit & Run was the show’s 22nd game adaptation, but it’s the one that lasted
Yet Hit & Run’s sustained relevance is, on its surface, a bit of an enigma. You’d be hard-pressed to find the game included in any critical canons or best-of lists, and there’s hardly been a shortage of T-rated open-world games since its release. But for many, the game isn’t just a source of nostalgia today; it was an introduction to a wholly new form of in-game self-expression. I looked into the still-growing community keeping it alive today.
By the time I’d grown up and cobbled together enough cash to purchase a PS4 and a copy of GTA V, I considered Hit & Run a sentimental artifact from a wistful past. Yet as I advanced through GTA V, I pictured myself swerving across Springfield’s boardwalk in Lisa’s Malibu Stacy Car. I figured I was alone in this. YouTube quickly proved me wrong, yielding Hit and Run videos whose view counts number in the millions - but I couldn’t understand why. Despite the design lead’s enthusiasm, Hit & Run has not received an official remake, and it takes effort to get the game to run properly on modern PCs.
Then I discovered Hit & Run’s extensive modding scene. Two channels in particular have found success in translating Hit & Run for the modern era:El Gato Del Trejado, who produces videos featuring their own Hit And Run “remastered mod,” andReubs, whose “remake” project made headlines when it wascompleted last month. Though not publicly playable, Reubs' remake is an immaculate reimagining of Hit & Run in the Unreal Engine. Like me, Reubs discovered Hit & Run in his youth. “I had a pretty unsettled childhood and video games were a great escape,” Reubs tells me. “I would sit there for hours and get completely lost in them.”
GTA III re-contextualised in-game violence. No longer solely a means of overcoming challenges or gaining progress, it was also the primary way to interact the game environment. A player could shoot or run over a majority of the NPCs they encountered, making small spectacles out of every car explosion or police shootout. But moral panics plagued GTA’s ascent to popularity, often centred on its sexual and violent content. These controversies came to a head when PS2 modders founda hidden minigamecrudely simulating sex in San Andreas' code. For some parents, the violence was already pushing it. The promise of low-poly pornography, however, crossed a line.
There was always, however, Hit & Run.
The game’s roster of vehicles represents a catalogue of references in itself, giving players the chance to drive cars like Mr. Plow (season 4, episode 9) or Marge’s Canyonero (season 10, episode 15). The dialogue — written by members of The Simpsons' writers' room and delivered by the original cast — contains both original quips and memorable one-liners from past episodes. Though stringent copyright laws often limit the scope of fan remakes, Reubs' was lucky in that he didn’t have to code from scratch. “Hit & Run has a huge modding community, and their tools made it incredibly easy to do this,” Reubs says. “Without them I probably never would have attempted the remake in the first place.”
The most prominent Hit & Run modding organization isDonut Team, who operate a forum and Discord server dedicated to sharing and celebrating fanmade Hit & Run content. In addition to showcasing their main project —“Project Donut”, a mod that includes original missions, vehicles, and characters — the forums also provide aspiring modders with a variety of tools.
Donut Team have produced a staggering number of Hit & Run mods over the years. Some of the most ambitious projects includeAnnoy Squidward, which swaps The Simpsons out for Spongebob Squarepants;More Costumes, which includes over a hundred hand-designed costumes constituting references to the show; and the in-progressFuturama: Hit & Run, a total conversion mod that takes place in Futurama’s New New York.
Though Donut Team was founded a decade ago, Jake, one of the organisation’s founding members, estimates they receive 50-100 new members a day. “With a forum, you see years of expertise, discussion and creativity build and grow,” he says. “That’s something that we deeply miss about the older internet.”
Nostalgia unites the Donut Team community. For users who exited adolescence knowing virtual Springfield like the back of their banana-toned hand, Hit & Run mods have become a way of turning an old haunt into a site for self-expression. “It’s a way of changing a world you already love,” Donut Team member Evie tells me.
This is perhaps the reason why the community’s mods rarely deviate from Hit & Run’s T-rated approach to violence. While some mods may attempt to address modern expectations of open-world games — QoL improvements like a"fully connected" maporupdated UI elements— most of them adhere to Hit & Run’s mission structures, telling new stories in the form of races and time trials rather than assassinations or bloody bank heists gone awry. To mod Hit & Run with this kind of new content is to reevaluate what made the game unique as a sandbox storytelling engine.
Hit & Run’s sustained popularity in the world of modding grants clarity to the yearning that I and many of my generational peers harboured back when GTA III was a forbidden text. The violence was only ever one half of the equation; Hit & Run compensated for its lack of guns by focusing on its vehicles, making them the game’s primary means of self-expression. In the age ofElden Ringand The Legend Of Zelda: Tears Of The Kingdom, the open-world genre has expanded to encapsulate a number of different settings and ideas. No longer are non-linear, fully explorable 3D worlds beholden to stories about organised crime and virtual dioramas of real-world metropoles.
I’ve slaughtered countless cowboys trekking through Read Dead Redemption 2’s Lemoyne County. I’ve dismembered a dystopia’s worth of biohackers inCyberpunk 2077’s Night City. But I’ll never forget the hours I spent crashing through Evergreen Terrace in the Simpsons' family sedan, a neighborhood I almost knew better than my own.
