The Simpsons have a long, strange love affair with video games | games

AAnd so Fortnite has done it again. Over the past five years, developer Epic Games has maintained the relevance and awareness of the retro online shooter by producing popular cultural collaborations, from Marvel to John Wick to Sabrina Carpenter. For limited times, players can participate in the game as their favorite movie characters and music artists, an arrangement that provides up-to-the-minute audience numbers for the game – and a tidy revenue stream for brands.

Now it’s the Simpsons’ turn. This month, Fortnite’s island becomes a miniature Springfield, complete with popular characters and recognizable locations. If you want to play as Homer and shoot up Moe’s Tavern, you can. If you want to take Bart to Kwik-E-Mart to get a sponge, go ahead. Everywhere you look, there’s a fun little Simpsons Easter egg, from the fact that the Battlebus (which transports players to the island) is now piloted by Otis to the presence of Duffman, Seymour Skinner’s steamed pork, and drool-worthy aliens.

But the Fortnite link is just the latest example of the long-standing symbiotic relationship between The Simpsons and video games. In 1991, less than two years after the show’s debut, Acclaim released Bart vs The Space Mutants, a side-scrolling platform game in which Bart must defeat an extraterrestrial invasion by making frustrating pixel-perfect jumps and fighting bosses including Nelson and Sideshow Bob, while “enjoying” a distorted audio sample of “eat my shorts” over and over again.

Despite mediocre reviews, the game sold one million copies, and inspired a series of Bart-focused games such as Bart vs The World and Bart’s House of Weirdness. This interaction made perfect sense. Bart, of course, is a huge video game fan, and in the early days of the show, when he was the focal point of the writing, he represented the target demographic of the contemporary gaming industry: a mischievous 10-year-old boy with an interest in comic violence.

The relationship would come to the fore in the classic 1995 Christmas episode Marge Be Not Proud in which Bart watches a TV ad for an ultra-violent hack called Bonestorm. (The commercial features a macho Santa rushing into the family’s living room carrying a rocket launcher and shouting, “Tell your folks, buy me Bonestorm or go to hell!”) It’s an obvious parody of the frenetic, highly targeted marketing behind 1992’s Mortal Kombat, a game that Bart would have enjoyed thanks to its array of decapitations and disembowelments. At the end of the episode, Bart gets a video game for Christmas, but it’s a multiplication challenge game given to me by Lee Carvalho. It’s funny, but it’s also emblematic of the console war of the time: the Sega Mega Drive rebelling against the family-friendly Nintendo Entertainment System.

The best early Simpsons game will arrive a few months after Bart vs Space Mutants. A 1992 arcade hit, The Simpsons is an excellent four-player brawler in which the family takes on Mr. Burns – who, in a ridiculous plot that’s just an excuse to visit lots of Springfield locations and attack enemies with skateboards and vacuum cleaners – has kidnapped Maggie. My favorite example from the ’90s, though, was 1996’s The Simpsons Cartoon Studio release on PC, which gave players a collection of locations, characters, and audio clips from the show to create their own little Simpsons cartoons — a little taste of the TikTok memes that Fortnite Simpsons fans got to make and share.

Meanwhile, the show itself has continued to find new ways to gently satirize video games. Springfield’s regular feature, Noiseland, is filled with fun coin-operated rides, from Jane Fonda’s Legwarmers of Death to Season 5’s Boy-Scoutz ‘n the Hood’s adorable My Dinner With André (tap the joystick to deliver “Trenchant Insight”). But the games are also used as a useful pop cultural tool to poke fun at the characters themselves. A favorite among the devout Flanders kids is Billy Graham’s “Bible Blaster,” an evangelical sermon in which Rod Flanders shouts, “Keep shooting; ’round the heathens!”

However, the Simpsons video game that perhaps best foretells the Fortnite connection is 2003’s much-loved Simpsons Hit & Run, a brilliant imitation of Grand Theft Auto’s Homer interface. Here you can drive around the city to visit the Android’s Dungeon, the Krusty Burger, and the Legitimate Businessman’s Social Club, while carrying out missions to prevent another strange conspiracy. This was, to be honest, the last great Simpsons title, and it’s interesting that a lot of the gaming press coverage regarding the Fortnite tie-in is basically: “I’d rather get Hit & Run 2, but I think this will do.”

What this collaboration really shows is how The Simpsons has continued to remain a cultural icon, despite its decline as a must-see television phenomenon. The dizzying mix of slapstick, parody, and social commentary aligns itself with disturbing, self-aware video game narratives, where insane violence often intersects with gooey sentimentality and laugh-out-loud laughs. Both The Simpsons and video games originated in the early 1990s, a hyperactive postmodern theme park of the era, and both continue to explore and exploit the worst excesses of our consumer society. Fortnite may not be the place we wanted to find a proper, modern Simpsons game, but it makes sense for it to be here – a palace of memes, soundbites and cartoonish anecdotes that will no doubt continue to generate enjoyment and money for many years to come.

What are you playing?

Despite how much I enjoyed it, I think Ball x Pit might be a bit too raunchy. An unsettlingly powerful mix of Space Invaders, Vampire Survivors, and old ball-bounce action games like Breakout, an arcade dungeon crawler where you shoot balls at lines of descending hordes of skeletons as you descend into an endless pit. Balls bounce off enemies, burn them, poison them, or pass through them; Each wave of defeated creatures unlocks a new set of perks, bonuses, and upgrades that you can combine. Above ground, you can build a base for your characters and direct them to harvest wood and stone to build more. The screen is always visually disharmonious, cluttered with mesmerizing waves of creatures, spells, and bouncing balls. Most of the time I feel as if she is playing herself. But still: it’s very absorbing. Kiza MacDonald

Available on: Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 5, Xbox, PC, Mac
Estimated playing time: Maybe forever, in 15-20 minute bursts

What are you reading?

• The Independent Workers Union of Great Britain, which represents a wide variety of workers in the gig economy including those who work on contracts at video game studios, has accused the producer of Grand Theft Auto VI of… Rockstar games “The most blatant and draconian act of union busting in the history of the gaming industry.” Rockstar has denied accusations that at least 30 IWGB union members at Rockstar Lincoln were fired for “serious misconduct.”

• Some good news about sales of older consoles: Nintendo Switch 2 It has sold nearly 11 million units since its launch in June, putting it comfortably ahead of the PlayStation 5 as the biggest console launch in history. Meanwhile, the original Switch is on track to become Nintendo’s best-selling console of all time with more than 154 million sales, and within a few years it could surpass the PlayStation 2 for the overall record (160 million).

• Some Halo co-creators have responded to the Trump administration’s use of Video Game Memes for ICE Recruitment. Via Game File, Master Chief designer Marcus Leto said, “It really makes me sick to see Halo chosen in this way,” while designer Jaime Griesemer called it “despicable.” Meanwhile, Martin O’Donnell, composer of the legendary Halo soundtrack, is running for Congress in Nevada as a Republican, posting: “I will work with the Trump administration to destroy the Flood once and for all!”

What to click on

Question block

reader Kirk This week’s question asks:

“I admire the beauty of many games, but I am disappointed by so many of them Very violent. Is it perhaps too difficult to create exciting games that don’t involve fighting? Not all games are violent, but it seems that all big budget games are.

This is a much-discussed question among game designers and thinkers. Since Space Invaders, video games have presented players with an enemy to defeat: without competition, combat, and adrenaline, how can you make it fun? Some argue that conflict is the driving force behind most stories, an almost inevitable part of game design. Others view violence in video games as a failure of imagination.

Writing at Gamesindustry.biz in 2017, game designer Brie Code theorized that most games were geared toward stimulating the player’s fight-or-flight stress response, and wrote about how games were moving toward a different approach: leaning and befriending. “What is missing in game design? I ask this question in terms of game mechanics and game systems. I ask in terms of adrenaline, dopamine, oxytocin, opioids, and other reward systems. I ask in terms of gameplay, which helps a wide range of people understand themselves, their responses to stress, and to the world.”

I also remember the Game Developer article by Brian Fairbanks. “Life is complicated, messy, exhausting, and painful,” he wrote. “Our problems take many forms, and the entertainment we choose takes those problems, distills them into a single entity, and labels them as the enemy.” “The problem here is that in non-violent games, we can’t access that power in the same way. Our games are designed so that challenge and progress aren’t about literally destroying your problems with weapons. We have to find other ways to get there.”

By the way, there are a lot of non-violent games out there. Some of them, like Animal Crossing, are definitely blockbusters. There is no comprehensive database about them, however com. ThinkyGames is the closest (you can filter action, combat, and timing), and there’s also an active page for non-violent entertainment on steam. For family-friendly, violence-free games, Common sense media It is a good resource. yourM

If you have a question about the Q&A – or anything else you’d like to say about the newsletter – Email us at pushbuttons@theguardian.com.