One of Hartman's characters, TV and Infomercial host Troy McClure, introduced players to the virtual experience at the very start of the game. 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.
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. For the time it was an incredible feat, but future episodes contradicted their hard work and made their Springfield outdated.īesides the detailed town map, another one of Virtual Springfield's major attributes was the inclusion of all of the major voice actors, who were already stars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. Working from there, they then placed locations based on what they could glean from the backgrounds of shots. They picked two locations as logical starting points for the town's map-Evergreen Terrace and Springfield Town Hall. 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. Roarty, who was a programmer and designer on Virtual Springfield, adds. "The one really clear memory is they sent us videotapes of every show from the beginning in these unmarked white boxes," Morgan R. 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. "If they needed something for an episode, they just created it. "They admittedly paid no attention to when they were making The Simpsons," Viner recalls. But it also meant Virtual Springfield wasn't easy to build. Finally we could see how different locations in the town fit together. The Simpsons' inconsistent geography is one of its longest-running gags, which is what made the game such an exciting prospect at the time.
LARRY THE LOOTER APPEARED IN THE SIMPSONS FULL
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. "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. 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. But these weren't the focus of the experience or even required to get the most out of the game. 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. 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. One of the most remarkable things about Virtual Springfield was its lack of urgency. 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. I remember spending countless hours making different slushies in the Kwik-E Mart, trying to avoid death in Larry the Looter in Noiseland Arcade (spoiler: you can't), and taking my chances on the Love Tester in Moe's Tavern only to land on Cold Fish yet again. Not only did it feature hours of brand-new dialogue from The Simpsons' voice actors, including the late great Phil Hartman in his only appearance in a Simpsons videogame, but it was one of the first attempts at mapping The Simpsons' hometown in 3D.Īs a kid it was one of the few games that I could get to run on my home PC. Released at the height of The Simpsons' popularity as it entered its sixth season, Virtual Springfield let you walk around a 3D recreation of the town, visiting memorable locations like Moe's Tavern, the power plant, and Springfield Elementary. This is just one of many unusual stories from the development of Virtual Springfield, a project that wasn't your typical licensed videogame-or even much of a videogame at all. It had all the Fox Interactive people with Matt Groening in front of the house and we were like 'What is this?' We didn't know about it at all." "Because we had conversations with Matt Groening and most of the time the people at Fox Interactive wanted to play intermediary, so this was an event that we only read about. "Being 24 or 25, it was a sore spot," says Michael Viner, who was the lead designer on Virtual Springfield at Vortex Media Arts and later Digital Evolution.
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