The Simpsons: Hit and Run Fan Remake Will Never Be Released

A new fan remake of The Simpsons: Hit and Run will never see the light of day. If you owned a PS2 and were actively playing games in the early 2000s, there's a very good chance you played The Simpsons: Hit and Run. It was one of the most popular games of its era, taking the massive success of the beloved animated series and combining it with the runaway success of Rockstar's newly-found open-world formula with the Grand Theft Auto series. It was an unlikely, but extremely lucrative match made in heaven. It came hot off the heels of Grand Theft Auto 3 and the decent reception of The Simpsons: Road Rage, priming it to be a huge commercial juggernaut in the game's industry. It was so big and so beloved, that even 20 years later, fans want a remake.

While we have no idea if an official remake will ever happen, a fan has taken it upon themselves to make it happen. Creator Reuben "Reubs" Ward has remade The Simpsons: Hit and Run in Unreal Engine 5 with tons of upgrades to make it feel as modern as possible. There's an explorable open-world, graphical upgrades, finer attention to details, and even a character switcher similar to that of Grand Theft Auto V's, as you can play as the whole Simpsons family in the game. The project is now complete after about a year's worth of development, but there's one down side. Unfortunately, since it's just a fan project, it's not going to be released to the public. The Simpsons is now under Disney's ownership, a very litigious company that doesn't really sanction those kinds of projects for public release. 

However, it's always possible Disney sees how cool this project is, the fan demand behind, and weighs the odds of a remake's success. Perhaps it will greenlight a proper remake for itself, but it's hard to say. The game was made initially by Free Radical, which is now under Activision, which is now getting swallowed up by Activision so that may lead to a bunch of various legal conundrums.

Do you want a remake of The Simpsons: Hit and Run? Let me know in the comments or hit me up on Twitter @Cade_Onder.