The Simpsons: The Game Q&A Feature

The Simpsons have a long and commercially successful history with videogames. Whether it's platform games from back in the day such as The Simpsons Arcade Game and Bart vs. The Space Mutants, or more recent games such as Road Rage and Hit & Run. Fitting, then, that EA Redwood Shores are taking us back to the original videogame stomping grounds of the yellow family with an action platformer.

TVG: We found that the game really feels like a Simpsons episode from start to finish, what with the plot and in-jokes throughout the game. Did you use Simpson's writers for that? Because obviously there's a lot of dialogue...

The game is a wonderful collaboration between the writers of the shows and ourselves. We obviously specialise in games development and they've obviously been doing this for a really long time. One of the things is that the guys who worked with us, the writers on the show, they're also gamers. So, they were really the ones to do this game with us because they get the jokes. If you're going to do a Katamari Damacy joke or whatever, you certainly need to have some writers who get it.

One of the things that was really cool was that the concept came from them, our job was to go back and expand on it, and help create as well as develop the story. So we're like: 'If we're going to make fun of videogames, what about this game? And this game?' It was a wonderful collaboration because once all the levels were done we said 'This is how the story is going to flow', then those guys went off and wrote the script and dialogue. Like the dialogue you're hearing here; it's just wonderful, it's just great jokes. Whether it's a Simpsons joke or a videogame joke, there's just some really funny stuff.

TVG: So these are Simpson's writers who've worked on the show before and they've come over and done some dialogue for you?

Yeah, absolutely. Matt Selman, Matt Warburton and Tim Long were the principal writers and I believe those guys actually worked on Hit & Run as well, so they've been doing this for the Simpsons franchise for a while. But this one was certainly their finest work - no doubt.

TVG: It sounds like a great collaboration between you guys...

Yeah, well, we didn't want to do The Simpsons playing Crazy Taxi or whatever, so once the main concept of the game was established - that the Simpsons have been licensed into a computer game - you become self aware. It just kind of took off from there and it was a wonderful design from early on, so we're really happy with it.

TVG: We also saw other Simpsons trademarks in the game. For example, the evil EA Executives are reminiscent of Fox in the TV shows in that 'biting the hand that feeds you' way. There's also the videogame clichés you have to collect (e.g. the double jump, exploding a barrel and swimming not available until the sequel achievement clichés), as well as GTA and Medal of Honour parodies. As a developer, how did you go about bringing that style of Simpsons humour to the game?

There's so many different kinds of comedy. Whether it's physical comedy, political and social commentary or what have you. What The Simpsons has been doing for a very long time is that if you watch the show you'll see social commentary that older audiences will get, but then why do children like the show? It's because there's a physical aspect to the show.

You need to be able to work jokes on many different levels, so the story alone is hilarious. Then there's the action that the characters do: Homer becoming Homer Ball, burping and doing these physical sorts of things. With this we needed to make sure that the feedback a player got from the game was light-hearted and enjoyable. So, when you're trying to make the funniest game ever, you have to constantly look and say 'Is that funny and could it be funnier, or how can we do that?' Whether it's site gags or posters on the walls, it's all in the timing, pacing and nailing those things on different levels.

There are some jokes that maybe 2% of the players will get, but should you not do that joke? No! You should do that joke but you need to have the structure of a game that's just a fun game to play and we absolutely want to have jokes that only a really small percentage of the people will get. Because if you're the one who gets it, you're going to ring up your friends and say 'Did you see that joke?' Like you earlier: you saw the Gummy Venus de Milo and you knew that right away, and I'm sure you recall that being one of the greatest episodes - the candy convention episode.

Every single one of those we do gives us credentials with the fans. It proves to the fans that the people who made this game really focused on the details. Because we're doing parody and comedy, this game is really in the detail more than any game I've ever worked on and we really feel like we've nailed it on this one.

TVG: While it's taking the piss out of everything else, like the Simpsons does, there's also an element to the game that's kind of like the film where Homer says: "I can't believe we're paying to see something we get on TV for free! If you ask me everyone in this theatre is a giant sucker." It's that self-mocking Simpsons thing and that appears to be in the game as well. Is that intentional?

One of the cool things about making this game is that we were cleared early on to take the piss out of ourselves and we just ran with it. I've worked for EA for many years with people like Jonathan Knight, the Creator Director, and we've been around this company for a long time. We know that we've made some bad games. We deal with this on a regular basis, everyone says 'EA are an evil corporation. They don't make good games,' which is not true. We make a lot of games and some games aren't very good. There've been some wonderful games that we've done - look at The Sims! I don't play The Sims but it's one of the greatest selling videogames of all time. You can't say that we're this evil corporation that doesn't make good products, but what we do know is that we can make fun of the fact that we are EA and we can make fun of the fact that these things happen, but it was cool for the company to say 'Yeah, go for it, poke fun at ourselves.'

The Medal of Honour team could've easily been like 'We don't find that funny,' but they didn't. It's parody, and one of the most important things about parody is if you're going to make fun of other people, you have to make fun of yourself. If you don't make fun of yourself; if you don't have self-deprecating humour, then the parody you try to pull off will often feel very forced, as opposed to saying 'I know we're not perfect, but we do make good products and if we're going to take shots at Grand Theft Auto or whatever games we do, we do it out of respect for the fact that it's been a very successful franchise.' In no way are we going to affect their sales or product.

TVG: Obviously, it's a platform game primarily and that's the age-old genre - it's the classic. These days you have to find new and fresh angles on the genre and perhaps this is a good take on it. With the kind of self-awareness that's present throughout the game and taking the piss out of everything, it works well on a platform game in that sense...

Yeah, and you know what's really interesting to is that when we focused tested this game in front of people that haven't played a lot of this genre, they struggle quite a bit until they get a grip with things like the double jump. You would be absolutely shocked and amazed at how many people know about the double jump. When we were looking at how we were going to make this game and we wanted to go with the action platformer, we knew that we wanted the characters to be on-screen, we didn't want them behind the wheels of a car, we wanted them to see the characters and their great costumes (like the Medal of Homer costumes). So, we knew right away that we wanted a third person camera perspective because we wanted you to be able to see that.

Once you've established that, then that automatically puts you in the frame of like 'Well, what kind of game could it be?' Well, it's going to be an action kind of game. There're things that we did that maybe we shouldn't have done in retrospect but there's other things to, like we often feel like there's not enough platformers anymore. And, even if you look at companies like Naughty Dog that has gone away from doing Jak and Dexter and now their doing Uncharted, which is a shooter. Sucker Punch - which used to do Sly Cooper - is now doing this more mature themed kind of thing. Our game is now really starting to stand out because it's really wonderful for people to be looking at it and saying it's kind of like playing an old-skool Nintendo game. To me I think that's the highest form of compliment I could ever get.

TVG: Was the license agreement that EA entered into with Fox a multi-title agreement?

Yeah, I can't speak about that too much but we do have the license for a number of years. So, obviously we want to continue making Simpsons products with them. It's a multi game deal, so fingers crossed - and I think we're pretty confident - it should be a hit title and obviously we'll want to look and figure out what we can do further on beyond that. We put as many parodies and jokes in here as we could, but obviously there're many more.

TVG: In the likely event that it will sell very well, are we likely to see them take on other genres as well like The Simpsons have in the past?

Yeah, again we haven't really started talking about that too much, but I think that based on how the fans have reacted to this, it's certainly something that we want to do. Obviously you guys in the gaming press have loved it. So, Simpsons fans and gaming press people have loved it, but we still have to go out and see how the general market reacts to a game that's based on parody.

TVG: Did you look at any other successful Simpsons games from the past like Hit & Run when it came to developing the game?

Yeah, absolutely. I've played almost all of them myself. It's really funny the reasons I continued to play those games too. The reason I continued to play Road Rage or Hit & Run was that the dialogue is so funny and I wanted to hear more of the things they had to say. While I eventually got pretty bored of the gameplay in Hit & Run, I still wanted to finish it because it was a compelling story of something going on and that's a credit to the writers of course - to be able to piece together a very good story-arc in a videogame.

The Simpsons Game is dead-on it because you're able to have a story and the gameplay mechanics, the parody, the writing and all these things fit together so perfectly into a very cohesive plot. If you were able to describe The Simpsons game in a few brief sentences you'd say that it's the cohesion of all the principles that makes The Simpsons good. It's funny, they have physical aspects to and all those things. We definitely looked at the other games, but I think one of the first things we had to do was absolutely distance ourselves from those games.

TVG would like to thank Greg Rizzer for taking the time out to speak to us about the The Simpsons Game, which is due out on November 2nd.