'The Simpsons: Hit & Run' Just Got Remade By One Guy In A Week
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Featured Image Credit: 20th Century Fox, reubs via YouTube
The Simpsons: Hit & Run. Just the thought of it transports you to afternoons after school, sinking hours and hours into Springfield, whalloping wasp cameras for coins. And now, YouTuber and developer reubs has recreated the entire game in Unreal Engine 5 in one week.
Seems simple enough, eh? Well, reubs isn't battling the "complicated corporate octopus" that guards the cave to the coveted The Simpsons: Hit & Run official remaster. The executive producer of the action-adventures shares the enthusiasm of the players to see the game return, however, the fact that the original developer no longer exists is a factor to consider. Moreover, The Simpsons belongs to 20th Century Studios which was folded into Disney, the doughy blob of a corporation that soaks up super successful properties all over the shop, in 2019.
Thus and therefore, it would be a tough task to ask Disney to move its gaze from the promising development of Avatar: Frontiers Of Pandora to a possible The Simpsons: Hit & Run remaster. It's only got billions in its pockets, everyone. It can't do it all.
Here is the definitive list of the best The Simpsons games ever to grace our meagre lives. Well. It's ours and we think it's rather good, so it's the definitive list if you ask us.
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Fortunately, there are developers like reubs to fulfil our plaintive pleas. How did they do it? "I could technically remake the entire map from scratch," explained the YouTuber, who has other videos showing off how they've remade Skyrim, Call of Duty, and Grand Theft Auto V. "But, you would need a team of, like, 100 people. I only have three friends and I'm including my mum as one of those friends so that's just not enough people."
They were able to rip the files from the game but the material wasn't complete, so they needed to approach the issue from a different angle. Using a tool that was originally intended for Vice City, they were able to extract all of the levels and stitch them together to form the map of Springfield that you and I would recognise. Yet, the textures looked absolutely awful so reubs bought the license to an artificial intelligence software that enhances crunchy images for you.
Coding the playable character used the Advanced Animations Pack from the Unreal Engine assets store, which saved a lot of time. However, the Homer character model didn't match up to the model in Unreal Engine 5. So, reubs outsourced that job to a developer called Ellen in Sweden. Hi, Ellen from Sweden.
Surprisingly, the UI from the original The Simpsons: Hit & Run is 3D and so the developer used that same tool for the levels to extract the same menus, icons and text on the game. They've even been able to add Buzz Cola cards, vending machines and boxes for coins. The textures and newer assets look really snazzy when the project comes together, and the gameplay is the cherry on top of this ray-traced cake.
