Games

Fake Simpsons Video Games, Ranked (Updated for 2021)

Buy me Bonestorm or go to hell!

March 14, 2021

In an effort to get my work published on Kotaku, which quite frankly is not going super well, I am going to now rank all of the fake video games that appear on The Simpsons. As a ’90s child who has been raised on all things Simpsons (shirts, pajama bottoms, bed sheets, lunch boxes, I could go on and on), the entire show has been ingrained in me. And when I first starting playing games in the early ’90s, The Simpsons games were obviously go-to choices. When watching the show, some of my favorite jokes and gags were about the fictional games the writers made up, because they could see how big the merchandising empire had become.

My criteria for these are somewhat arbitrary: essentially it’s how funny the joke is, how cool the game looks, whether or not I would want to play it, and how iconic the game is to the episode/show. If there is some gameplay, that really helps the ranking out considerably, but it isn’t 100% necessary. You can kind of tell what type of game each is, the genre, or what it’s spoofing. But really there is no criteria, just enjoy these classic moments and references, since I globbed several games together in various places. Who cares! It’s a list, relax comment shitposters.

Shout-outs to some noteworthy runners-up that I couldn’t quite put on this list but really want to because I couldn’t find visual evidence of their existence or they didn’t quite qualify: Halloween Hit and Run, the Itchy & Scratchy handheld game Bart plays while getting a haircut, Astro Blast, Mixed Martian Arts, the Pachinko machine Bart plays when he buys it with the credit card he found, and that one unnamed game Grandpa Abe played once in “Lisa’s Pony”.