THE MAKING OF THE SIMPSONS HIT & RUN

For anyone who grew up enthralled by the early seasons of The Simpsons, Hit & Run is something of a nostalgia lodestone. Driving around its bright, pastel-coloured world, you’re encountered with one joke after the next from the ‘classic’ era of Matt Groening’s animated sitcom, whether through finding the Flanders family’s bomb shelter, trying your luck on the Love Tester, or simply picking up the most ridiculous vehicle you can find and going on a rampage. With a structure openly inspired by then-contemporary classic Grand Theft Auto III, developer Radical Entertainment managed to build off the back of the Crazy Taxi-inspired predecessor The Simpsons: Road Rage, creating an experience renowned to this day for its humour and engaging gameplay.

Designer Christopher Mitchell, now head of the school of creative technologies at Vancouver Film School, landed a job at Radical after transitioning into game development from teaching, first working on the action game James Cameron’s Dark Angel. “I was still very much learning the craft at that point, and didn’t entirely know what I was doing,” he smiles. “Dark Angel suffered through me and then, luckily, Radical liked me enough to put me onto The Simpsons.” He credits the success of Road Rage with restoring the confidence of publishers Fox Interactive in what had proven to be a “challenging licence”, perhaps most infamously represented by The Simpsons: Wrestling.

“Up until that point, the problem with games was co-showrunner Matt Selman, who worked on story and dialogue for . “We were like, everyone’s playing whatever version of , people need to get out of the cars,” he said in a recent IGN interview. “That was a huge creative battle over whether it was just a ‘driving around doing missions’ game or a ‘getting out of the car and doing missions’ game”.