It was an open world Simpsons experience years before Simpsons Road Rage or Simpsons Hit n' Run, and for my pre-adolescent brain it was the perfect vessel for my love of the show. One of the most remarkable things about Virtual Springfield was its lack of urgency. There were no difficult puzzles to prevent progression and no ham-fisted enemies to fight, just you and some of the most iconic locations and characters from the show in one place. There were some unlockable areas that required an item for entry, and 75 collectible Simpsons cards scattered around the town to collect to unlock a secret message from Simpsons' creator Matt Groening. But these weren't the focus of the experience or even required to get the most out of the game. Instead, Virtual Springfield was all about the novelty of poking around familiar locations on your own time and having the freedom to pick and choose where you wanted to head next. "I think we'd seen so many things that had tried to use The Simpsons as basically a means to make another type of game," Viner says.
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I think by making this type of game or at least this type of proposal, we were really saying, 'We're just going to build this world full of content that references or riffs off of what The Simpsons had already done.'" A virtual town "And we wanted this to exclusively be about The Simpsons, because we were all just big fans. LARRY THE LOOTER APPEARED IN THE SIMPSONS FULL
The Simpsons' inconsistent geography is one of its longest-running gags, which is what made the game such an exciting prospect at the time. Finally we could see how different locations in the town fit together. But it also meant Virtual Springfield wasn't easy to build. "They admittedly paid no attention to when they were making The Simpsons," Viner recalls. "If they needed something for an episode, they just created it. That was a big challenge for us - figuring out where things were located in juxtaposition in creating a map for Springfield." And they didn't think much about how it hooked into a neighbourhood. "The one really clear memory is they sent us videotapes of every show from the beginning in these unmarked white boxes," Morgan R. Roarty, who was a programmer and designer on Virtual Springfield, adds. I remember it being laid out on all these pieces of paper." "We basically had to watch all the shows and come up with the overall map of the town. They picked two locations as logical starting points for the town's map-Evergreen Terrace and Springfield Town Hall. Working from there, they then placed locations based on what they could glean from the backgrounds of shots.
For the time it was an incredible feat, but future episodes contradicted their hard work and made their Springfield outdated.īesides the detailed town map, another one of Virtual Springfield's major attributes was the inclusion of all of the major voice actors, who were already stars by this point. Hank Azaria had just finished filming The Birdcage with Robin Williams and Gene Hackman, and Phil Hartman was currently in the process of filming the Arnold Schwarzenegger Christmas film Jingle All The Way, in Minneapolis. Prior to this, the voice actors had only contributed grunts and catchphrases to other Simpsons games, mostly uncredited, but Virtual Springfield had its own script, overseen by The Simpsons' writing assistant Neil Alsip.
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One of Hartman's characters, TV and Infomercial host Troy McClure, introduced players to the virtual experience at the very start of the game.
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