The Simpsons: Hit & Run

The Simpsons: Hit & Run. Radical Entertainment, 2003. Played on an original GameCube in 2026, through a RetroTINK HD15 cable and a RetroTINK 4K onto a 43-inch mini LED TV.

This was never my game. My sibling owned The Simpsons: Hit & Run back in 2003, and I barely played it. The Simpsons itself, though, was a big part of my childhood, and the old episodes this game is built from are still lodged in my head today. So coming to it properly in 2026, and finishing the story for the first time, was an odd kind of nostalgia. Not for the game, but for everything it is made of.

It holds up far better than I expected. It is still more fun than anything The Simpsons has produced in years, and I include the show in that. It also runs out of ideas towards the end, badly enough that the final stretch is downright frustrating. Both of those things are true, and the second one does not cancel out the first.

Springfield is the star

The attention to detail in Springfield is amazing. 742 Evergreen Terrace, the Kwik-E-Mart, Burns Manor, the power plant: they are all there, looking the way they should, sitting where you expect them to be. Almost everything is a relic of, or a reference to, the old episodes, and I still remember most of those episodes today.

What really makes it work is that Springfield feels alive. There are NPCs wandering around, and it reads as a thriving town rather than a backdrop. That is something a lot of modern games could learn from.

The hidden collector cards are a nice touch. There are seven in each of the game's seven levels, 49 in all, and finding every one unlocks an Itchy & Scratchy cartoon. I stuck to the story myself, but the cards are a good idea, because they force you to explore Springfield rather than just drive through it.

Coming back as an adult, one detail stood out that would never have crossed my mind as a kid. Homer owns that house on a single wage. Today he would need to be a multimillionaire to afford Evergreen Terrace. I know it is fictional, but it stands out, and it made the whole game feel like a brief glimpse back into a sane and affordable world that no longer exists.

How it plays

It feels amazingly smooth, with good animations, and the driving is the heart of it. Every car I drove was fun in its own way. The AI drivers, on the other hand, are crazy.

The game was famously pitched inside Radical Entertainment as "GTA for kids", and I can see it. In its open world it really is a kind of Springfield Grand Theft Auto: you drive where you like, smash things, and the town reacts. The missions, though, are their own thing. They are races, chases and errands, built around the show's jokes rather than crime.

The best idea in it is the hit and run meter. Hit pedestrians, other cars or the scenery and a circle fills up. Fill it and the police come after you, and if they catch you it costs you 50 coins. It is a balancing act. Driving flat out through everything is tempting, but one bad stretch of destruction in the middle of a timed mission can easily ruin the run, so the game quietly pushes you to play somewhat cautiously. I think that is a good game mechanic.

The odd part is how little happens on foot. You can get out of the car whenever you like, and there is some jumping around to reach cards and coins, but it is clearly tacked on. It did not annoy me much, because it is so rarely part of the core game.

The GameCube controller performs well, and the camera has some minor jank, although for the era it is excellent.

The cast and the writing

The original actors voice everyone, and the script was written by people from the show, Matt Selman, Tim Long and Matt Warburton among them. Radical recorded more than 12,000 lines of dialogue, and the great cast of characters is true to the era I remember.

You play as Homer, Bart, Lisa, Marge and Apu across the seven levels, and all of them were fun and true to their original characters. The genuinely laugh-out-loud moments came mainly from Homer, and a few from Apu.

I also like that it never takes itself too seriously. The game happily references the fact that it is a video game, which suits The Simpsons perfectly. Pedestrians repeat the same lines a lot, and some critics hated that, but it did not bother me. It makes it feel like a video game, and that repetition is very on point for The Simpsons anyway.

It was funny coming back to it as an adult, too. A lot of the jokes have a slightly crude, adult motive underneath them that innocent me never picked up on, and that made me see some of the characters in a different light.

Where it wears thin

The missions do not vary enough, and by the end the game becomes repetitive. It is not the map. Springfield never got old for me, and it really does feel like a living town. It is the mission types: the same races, chases and pick-ups, again and again. The final Homer missions were the worst for it, literally repeating the same route.

Some of the mission timers are quite tight as well, and the game has enough jank that it can easily spoil a mission run. Towards the end that gets downright frustrating.

There are a few bugs. Chief Wiggum disappeared right in the middle of giving me a mission, which I only saw happen once, and there are some lip sync issues.

Even so, there is something here that I miss. It is rewarding to finish a mission on the fifth attempt, after optimising it. That feels earned, which is more than I can say for a lot of modern slop that you play through on an endless easy mode.

Earned, not bought

The costumes and vehicles are all bought with coins you earn in the game, and extra cars are won by completing side quests. There is not a single bit of DLC or microtransaction nonsense anywhere. Some missions ask for a particular costume or car, and one retrospective calls that a chore, but I never found it so. It is just part of the game, with some minimal grinding for coins now and then.

I would love a remake. Matt Groening said this year that he thinks "the original game is coming back in some form", and I hope it does, but if it comes back riddled with DLC it will be awful. The original graphics also have a lot of Simpsons charm, and I would not want to lose that.

It still feels modern

That is the part that surprised me most. The graphics, the sound and the voice acting still make the game feel modern, which is incredible considering its age. The music suits the game, does not sound dated, and sounds very Simpsons.

More than anything, it is a literal feel-good game. It is a cure for a bad day, or for a bit of anxiety.

Where it came from, and playing it today

Hit & Run was Radical Entertainment's follow-up to The Simpsons: Road Rage from 2001, deliberately not a straight sequel. It came out in September 2003 in North America and that October in Europe, on GameCube, PlayStation 2 and Xbox, with a PC version two months later. It sold more than three million copies by 2007. Radical planned sequels, and a PSP port was started, but the sequels died when Vivendi did not renew the Simpsons licence, and the PSP version was cancelled.

It has never been re-released on a modern platform. Playing it today means the original discs on the original hardware, or the PC version, which has a busy modding scene of its own since the game's source code leaked in 2021. My setup was an original GameCube through a RetroTINK HD15 cable into a RetroTINK 4K, onto a 43-inch mini LED TV.

The verdict

Eight out of ten. Still fun in 2026, and better than anything The Simpsons has produced recently, even though it gets repetitive and frustrating towards the end.