I love The Simpsons: Hit and Run. I loved it as a kid, and I love it now. In fact – no joke – when I was 12 I gave one of my early crushes my copy of the game as a gift, and was immediately filled with regret at what I'd done the second the case left my hand. Not only was it a deeply lame gesture, but now I didn't even have an open world comedy classic to take my mind off my mistake.
And clearly I'm not the only one who loves it. Recently there's been a fair amount of discussion online around the need for a remake, now that Hit and Run is firmly in the nostalgic period, buoyed in part by one impressive fan who spent years rebuilding the game from scratch. But I'm currently replaying The Simpsons' antics on my old PS2, and… I honestly don't think I want a remake. And if you strip away the rose-tinted beer goggles, you probably don't either.
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Meandering back into Springfield for the first time in nearly twenty years, I was preemptively bracing myself for the unflattering early 3D and flapping, animatronic-like mouths beneath inexpressive faces. But what caught me more off guard was how primitive the mechanics felt. The driving is springy and perfectly adequate, but pretty rudimentary even for the time. And once out of the car, all any of the characters can do is run, double jump and kick – a very basic moveset that has got to carry you across a twenty-hour game.
Hit and Run is a creature of 2003, down to the DNA. It's both a fatal flaw and its greatest strength.
So it's pretty vestigial. Beyond that there's no weapons of any kind, no mobility skills, and a lot of missions that are often barely more than "drive to place before the timer runs out." I'll remind you that Grand Theft Auto 3 was two years old at this point, and San Andreas would debut only a few months afterwards. Even 22 years ago this wasn't cutting edge, and in 2025 it can sometimes feel like you've managed to obtain some back-alley alpha build.
Which isn't to say that Hit and Run is not still very fun to play, because it most definitely is. There's a simple moreishness to the experience, in part because driving has a bumper-car-bounciness, and also because that whole "drive to place before the timer runs out" format is significantly elevated by the game's omnipresent humor. True, a lot of it is just references to the show in its golden age… but hey, that's basically all I do too, so no judgement there! And Hit and Run's not above finding new sources of comedy to mine: one sequence that always makes me laugh is seeing Grandpa furiously ramble about fighting Nazi raccoons after downing a handful of caffeine pills, with dialogue that could've been snatched from Conan himself.
Which was the style at the time
The thing with a remake is that you can't help but ask yourself: is all this effort actually worth it? The benchmark for remakes, as I see it, would be something like Resident Evil 2. The 2019 version of that game ultimately felt like the game that Capcom would have made if the handcrank-powered technology of 1998 had allowed for it, an evolution of the original vision that was nonetheless loyal to it. Meanwhile, the Last of Us Part 1 sits comfortably at the other end of that scale, the "corporate wants you to find the difference" meme made manifest.
But to me Hit and Run really just feels like the most complete version of itself, simple as it is, and a remake that seeks to fix its flaws would feel… odd. Filling it out with new mechanics would demand a completely different kind of game built around it. Likewise, while the polygonal flapping heads are a bit ugly, the boxy look of old 3D actually fits quite well with Springfield's aesthetic, where all the cast and landscape are all modelled on basic, geometric shapes.
And the elements that haven't aged well can't really be fixed. Turns out I'd not just forgotten about the gameplay's faults, I'd also forgotten that an entire chapter is spent playing as Apu, a role I can't imagine any actor wanting to reprise these days. Hearing Hank 'As the Driven Snow' Azaria call people "crackers" or "whitey" in a less-than-convincing Indian accent is, uh… well, it's definitely of an era. A remake might be wise to leave it out altogether, but Apu's level is literally one-seventh of the entire game, and it'd result in a pretty reduced experience with a major chunk of the story hacked out.
The remaking of a classic game is a lot like a good orange and/or marriage
I have no idea where the rights to Hit and Run are right now. The game was published by Vivendi, which was then absorbed into what would become Activision-Blizzard in 2008, and even that morass is complicated by almost certainly needing Fox or Disney's approval to make anything tinted even the slightest bit yellow. With that in mind, the actual odds of a remake, port or sequel to Hit and Run aren't great, especially when a planned sequel was apparently turned down with no clear explanation as to why.
But if we're throwing coins into wishing wells, I'd be happy with a warts-and-all port to modern consoles, maybe with a texture pack to make it sit a little more easily on the eye. That'd be good for historical preservation (something the industry really needs to be better at) but a ground-up remake? No. Simpsons Hit and Run is a creature of 2003, down to the DNA. It's both a fatal flaw and its greatest strength – and trying to fix that only risks ruining the strange magic that made it one of the highlights of the legendary PS2 era.
Simpsons Hit and Run didn't make our list of the best PS2 games… but if I was writing it, it definitely would have.
