Talking Simpsons - Talking Simpsons - The Simpsons Arcade With Chris Kohler

Episode Date: September 15, 2021

We welcome back our friend/video game historian Chris Kohler, this time as we talk about the very first Simpsons game! Way back in early 1991, as season 2 aired, Konami released The Simpsons Arcade Game, featuring Smithers kidnapping Maggie and the family punching dozens of people to get her back. How does it hold up and what bits from the show were used? We go super in-depth into one of the few Simpsons games that's actually fun! Support this podcast and get dozens of bonus episodes by visiting Patreon.com/TalkingSimpsons and becoming a patron! Check out our new shirts on TeePublic! And please follow the new official Twitter, @TalkSimpsonsPod!

attention talking simpsons listeners we have a new podcast miniseries exclusively on patreon right now for five dollar and up subscribers at patreon.com slash talking simpsons you get talk king of the hill season two part one that's right we're returning to king of the hill once again putting out 11 new episodes covering the first half of the show's second season. Again, that is patreon.com slash TalkingSimpsons. Be there or be not right. I heartily endorse this event or product. Ahoy, ahoy, everybody, and welcome to Talking Simpsons, where we embrace nothingness. I'm your host, the bull and a big one liker, Bob Mackie, and this is our chronological exploration of The Simpsons.

Who is here with me today? Hello, it's Henry Gilbert. And who do we have on the line? It is Chris Kohler from Digital Eclipse. And today's episode is all about the Simpsons arcade game. Excellent. Where do you think you're going? This video game came out probably in March of 1991.

And as always, Henry will tell us what was happening at this point in video game history. Oh my God! Oh boy, Bobby. In arcade, Street Fighter 2 is about to see its warriors take over the world. Super Mario Bros. 3 is about to make a huge debut on the Nintendo Entertainment System. And Sonic the Hedgehog is about to give Sega a new Genesis. What a time to be alive. What a time to be nine or possibly, I guess, for you, Chris Kohler, 11?

11. The right age to be nine or possibly, I guess, for you, Chris Kohler, 11? 11. 11. The right age to be a child. If you were a child any other time, not the right age. I mean, Street Fighter 2, I probably didn't touch it until when it was up to like Turbo. I was just not a fighting game guy as a kid until my friends. Probably, I think I played Mortal Kombat before I played Street Fighter. That was the first game I got for my super nintendo because street fighter was that big

wow yes i mean yeah by 92 it was just uh half of game pro covers with street fighter 2 i think who haven't we used is blanca available and it really changed the face of video game arcades because stuff like i mean you know the the simpsons arcade game you know in early 1991 would have been you know very typical um of what you would find in arcades of people playing this sort of four player but you know fundamentally you versus the computer right type of arcade games but things were about to change into a an atmosphere of uh of competition very soon yeah spring of 91 feels like a real renaissance for arcades that lasted maybe five or six years because i guess there was sort of a lull between the previous golden age and street fighter and then there was a another big bubble right before you know console started out

pacing the arcade games at home yeah and i mean super mario brothers 3 what what is there to say other than just like it was an event. It was like the first event video game of my childhood. Like I, you know, I first heard about Super Mario Brothers from a friend of like, hey, look at this. It's this game called Super Mario Brothers. It's fun. And it even too, I was like, oh, I guess I'll like rent that or something.

And I, and you see the cartoon on TV, but like the advertising bonanza for super Mario brothers three, like the, the chanting commercial, I was so fully indoctrinated by it. The previews and Nintendo power magazine, and it's coming soon and, you know, getting obviously the wizard,

right. Which we, you know, I mean, you know, just, just the, the,

the hype for it. I remember we were in Which we, you know, I mean, you know, just the hype for it. I remember we were in our car, you know, going down the, taxiing by the local Toys R Us and we drove by it and there's a huge sign out on Toys R Us that Super Mario Brothers 3 is here,

you know, and we like made our parents turn around and go to the Toys R Us so we could get Super Mario Brothers 3. Such was the anticipation. This is a video game podcast now, and it's my job to be pedantic. Mario 3 was actually 1990.

Was it? Yes. Hell, crap. I must have seen the British date on there. I'm sorry. I fucked up. All right. Well, Sonic the Hedgehog was about to come out. I was right there. Mario World was already out in Japan. It was around the corner for us in August of 91.

It was a great time for video games. And yes, we're breaking format with the great Chris Kohler. Chris, you've been on my other podcast, Retronauts, a lot. But you also have a very rich and storied history with retro gaming in general. Yes. I do. Yeah, well, yes. I mean, I guess at the time we didn't consider retro gaming.

I guess we just considered them video games. But yeah, I guess it all sort of added up to a great deal of knowledge that I can now share on podcasts such as Retronauts and such as occasionally Talking Simpsons when it comes down to it. And here we are discussing the Simpsons arcade game, which I do have story time about whenever you want to hear it.

Well, and you just started back up another of your very popular podcasts. Did you not? We did just start it back up. We didn't intend to. It's called Good Job Brain. It is very much like this. We did just start it back up. We didn't intend to. It's called Good Job Brain. And it is very much like this. We only occasionally get into video games.

No, it's a trivia podcast from our pub trivia team. We kind of went on a hiatus because everybody had children all at the same time, basically. And it was kind of just tough to get the band back together. And then we just finally decided, like, wait a minute. We really love doing this. And people love listening to it so yeah it's back now um hopefully it's back for good um but uh yeah it's been nice it's been nice getting all back together again for sure awesome man and yes uh we i we are breaking format because you know we were in season two again and uh when we reached the point in the timeline where simpsons arcade came out

it's like we're not going to do an episode for every simpsons video game no no or possibly any other one perhaps not no i mean maybe in 09 when we are 08 when we reach the no 07 when we reach the simpsons game maybe we do something i refuse that's not a very good game all right then we're not doing that game That game is fine. It is a perfectly lukewarm slice of Electronic Arts game loaf served to you with a little Bart Simpson drawn on it, and that's basically as good as it is. Watch the cut scenes online. They're funny. But this is the first Simpsons game.

I mean, some would debate. The dates are... Records from that era are spotty at best and uh it's it's bart versus the space mutants i'd seen dates that said it hit the nintendo entertainment system in april and that simpsons arcade could have been seen in february or march uh at earliest in arcades so it's kind of like yeah up in the air which came first and if you want us to do an episode about uh bart versus the space students we did for another podcast how did this get played so check that out so we talked a lot about that game that wretched awful game yes yeah

which is probably the best of the bad games i guess most of them are bad yeah it's uh awful like they i mean i i think the difference is that like acclaim just got the license to have like oh well we want the next big thing for a license while the konami team was invested in making something that was at least fun to play for two minutes of a quarter you know like just to they had an interest in not just like for a claim if you bought the nes game or even just rented it they got you they don't care what you feel after you paid for that but uh but the simpsons arcade they kind of have to care a little bit about being good i i would say until hit and run this was the best simpsons game i think yeah it had that mystique because of course you couldn't't just download MAME and

play whatever arcade game you want at that point. You know, you actually had to go to a location where it existed and you had to, you know, put quarters into it to play it. And it was pretty, you know, it was not easy. So, you know, to really see the full thing, you had to spend a bunch of money or spend a bunch of time and hope that your mom stayed at the laundromat or whatever it was for long enough for you to play a lot of it. I it was it had this it had this unattainability uh to it you only got to play it a little bit which i think added i think to the enjoyment factor and i well i guess what's everybody's personal history with uh this that uh with the simpsons arcade game well it sounds like chris has a big story and i want to hear it yeah well i mean so i really um

i again i was like fascinated with it you know because it was so beautiful because the graphics were so good it had all the voices from this you know the simpsons and uh very funny right it's this very uh you know humor packed game and it was a lot of fun to play with people um and but of course again you had like a quarter or two and you're at the bowling alley, you're only going to experience a little bit of it. So I actually had a plan. We every spring during spring break from school when I was a young teenager, our one of our family's big vacations for the year was we would go to Myrtle Beach in South Carolina. And Myrtle Beach was great. Myrtle Beach, they all love the rest of of my family loved golfing i did not love golfing but um that myrtle beach was i mean they had you we could go you know we'd go every week to the or go um you know once during the week to the myrtle beach opry which was this like you

know country music slash comedy kind of show for tourists um i've not been to an opry or not museum down there which they did not have in connecticut so i always love going to the ripley's believer and it's all touristy kind of stuff right like very kid friendly and one of the things they had in myrtle beach was these massive arcades and it's like yeah we had arcades in the mall in connecticut or whatever but like you going down there these arcades were huge and it was stuff from all eras of of gaming because were massive. Lots and lots of stuff ended up down there. I think the first time I ever played the original Street Fighter, like Street Fighter 1 was down in Myrtle Beach

because, you know, again, the smaller arcades that I was going to in Connecticut, this stuff cycled out really quickly. But this seemed to be like the collection ground for everything. My parents would go and they would play. Again, at this point, this is the 90s, they had walls of these things, the electromechanical baseball games. Like, I don't know if you guys ever played one of these, but it was sort of like a pinball machine, but it was like playing baseball.

And it would pitch a little metal ball from the pitcher's mound and you try to hit it and knock it up into a section and the runners would advance around the bases. These machines took dimes. This is how old they were. And my parents would sit with a stack of dimes and play these things. And so we would trade in cans and bottles for the year leading up to Myrtle Beach and build up a stash of change, a stash of quarters. And these would be our quarters that we'd have for the arcade. So we'd walk in, you know, rich with quarters. And one year, probably like 92 or 93 just because it wouldn't

have been like right on the dot 91 i decided that i was going to use a decent i was going to use whatever it took and finish the simpsons arcade game because i really wanted to see everything in this game and so yeah uh it probably cost about, you know, $8, $10. I remember it costing like $10, $10, $11. That sounds right. To credit feed my way through this thing. That's the one and only time I finished the Simpsons arcade game in an arcade. But I remember feeling totally satisfied with my purchase because it was so much fun to go through and see absolutely everything and see what was at the end as well yeah my uh sort of similar story there of that like by the age eight when i was eight when this game came out or uh yeah and so i had already started getting into video games we had a nintendo

at home we had a game boy and i knew that video games could be in other places too like we would go to a restaurant and i'd see a donkey kong machine or an altered beast machine or a big one that would like just instantly pulled me in was the 89 ninja turtles arcade game because it was so much colorful and crazier looking than the nintendo games and it had voice clips. And I was like, well, this is a movie. I'm watching a movie on here. But I still associate those with like airports or whatever, like, or a hotel. I think it was by 1990 was the first time I started was like a friend had a birthday party at an arcade.

And I realized like, oh, arcades exist. Like these have video games all in him and i can just play anything right i believe it was attached to a putt putt place or a mini golf place and so uh this game for me the second i saw it i was like oh my god this is i like i didn't know konami as a company made both it and tmnt but i could recognize its similarities to like streets of rage and and other uh double dragon me and my brother i i also i have a younger brother and we really did like two-player co-op games like that and so it was either my brother's sixth birthday or my ninth our birthdays are like two weeks apart but we uh had our mom take us to mini golf and at the mini golf place

this game was there and my mom did something i don't think she did before but would do after which is she committed it's like okay as a birthday present wow i will do however many tokens it takes for you to beat this game and she'd get like 20 of tokens and also even just feed them for us which was very nice of her and so uh i was usually bart if my brother got bart before me then i'd be over uh wouldn't play no girls girl no no but yeah i and so we did see the credits on it i i think of it as a happy birthday memory of us finally beating mr burns and and yeah well as for me there was an arcade in my mall since before i could remember like anything before i was even aware so i was always aware of arcades and that is where in 1989 i saw like you

henry the teenage mutant ninja turtles arcade game by konami which sort of reinvented the format after double dragon the simpsons is basically in the same format as the ninja turtles arcade game by Konami, which sort of reinvented the format after Double Dragon. The Simpsons is basically in the same format as the Ninja Turtles arcade game two years prior. That game changed my life so much that the second I saw it, didn't even play it. I just saw it. I had no quarters. I called my friend when I got home. I like to think of a seven-year-old calling a friend. That's just a funny idea to me, but I did it in 1989. Like, you won't believe what's at the mall. There's a Ninja Turtles game. It is totally cool.

They talk in it. It's got the entire theme song. It didn't, of course. It tricks you into thinking that. Just like this game. Yes. But yes, so yeah. And because of, you know, reading Nintendo Power and being indoctrinated as Nintendo had planned from my birth,

I knew what Konami was. I knew the kind of games they made. I knew they were good and so by the time this game came around i was ready and i saw this in my uh local arcade that was in a strip mall that uh went away in like 97 but it was called fun apostrophe n pizza fun pizza i had a 10th birthday party there later but when i was nine i saw this in the spring of 1991 and i immediately fell in love with this game and would not beat it until probably like six to eight months later when i yes i spent 10 bucks on this game with a group of people i arrived as they had started the game and because

i had arrived as they started i was playing as lisa oh so yes and they did and they they absolutely so just like the ninja turtles game which is very clearly based on player one is always a certain turtle, player two is always a certain turtle. You don't pick who you are. And so with the Simpsons, they put Bart and Homer on player two and player three, which are in the center of the machine, figuring everybody's going to want to play as Bart. The next person's going to want to play as Homer.

And then, you know, the kids who come up later are going to be like, I have to play it, girl. And then they stick Marge and Lisa on the end. Of course, the funny thing is that Marge was first player. So when I played it in an emulator and I just had the first player controller, I just played the whole thing through as Marge. And I was very happy about it.

And when I was a kid and not understanding licensing agreements or whatever, it just blew my mind. Like, why don't they make a Super Nintendo version of this? All the other games are bad. Why can't? Well, now I know why. Yeah. And there are home ports of this and most of them are pretty bad.

I think like maybe the Amiga port or something like that comes the closest or the DOS port comes the closest. The company Acclaim had locked down all the rights to do the home console versions. Konami had the rights to arcade and Konami was able to get the rights to computer versions. Hence, you could play the Simpsons arcade game on MS-DOS. You figure they would have worked something out, you know, like, I mean,

just because Acclaim had the rights to publish the games didn't mean that they couldn't do a version of Konami's game, but I guess they just decided not to. Acclaim and them, weren't they? They were battling out, like the Turtle games were killing Acclaim games for like the ultra games turtle stuff was beating acclaim right yeah uh but

that but to me that gave it like extra prestige for me like the turtle i was not stupid enough to think that tmnt2 the arcade game was the exact same as the one that was in the arcades but when i played it at home with my brother it i at least felt like yeah i'm playing it this is the arcade if you look at it now it's so ambitious and it's still a good game but yeah like this was a time in which like you said henry uh arcade games are everywhere like in every lobby and every in the midwest every mud room there was an arcade machine set up every 7-eleven and still to this day if I see this game I will at least play the first level because you can beat the first level with one quarter maybe two that's

one of those things that's like so anachronistic in the Simpsons but I love it that in the quickie mart there's always that nuke arcade game there because it's like well yeah it's a it's a 7-Eleven they have to have one arcade game there just to like suck up spare change from children who buy their squishies there like that that's not part of the business anymore and then you know then we all went through the experience of being an adult playing it again and realizing like oh if you take out money from this equation it goes pretty fast it's about 20 minutes long yeah i think for a lot of people if it wasn't from just emulating every arcade game um it would have been when they paid five bucks for the tmnt 360 uh yeah 360 live game

and just saw like oh this last 10 minutes on free play this uh ninja turtles game and you know what konami didn't actually make a lot of uh brawlers or if you want to be fancy, a belt scroller. They didn't actually make a lot of these, despite how good they were at this genre. I guess, I mean, in the terms of video game history, this genre was like a blip. Because as soon as Street Fighter 2 came out in the same year, people were just less interested. So you'd see a trickle of a few more things like Konami. This same team, a lot of the same people would make the Bucky O'hare arcade game which is very beautiful but nobody cares about that ip so you'd see a few more brawlers here and there after this but it was just fighting games and nobody really cared about anything else so this is the same

year as turtles in time which again another peak of the genre yeah and i mean in the next year the x-men arcade game like me and my brother loved that so much and that was one where it wasn't just a fight over two characters we loved every character and it was just like so colorful and beautiful but yeah i guess uh now you know i'd i wouldn't buy a vintage arcade machine because i've seen the pains that my friends who have bought ones have they're just like this is just a pain in the ass i don't want one but uh i would if by the time you're listening to this it's been announced like there is a rumored arcade cabinet coming uh recreation of it i would pay up to a thousand dollars for it wow i just i do this game means

i love the just looking at it i mean there are those arcade one-up uh you know recreations of cabinets i hate to be a stick in the mud whenever i see those and people buying more than one i'm like just build a main cabinet guys you can put anything you want on the outside it's fine just build a main cabinet you could have more than one game available that's just me though some people just want to buy it out of the box you know that's the yeah yeah my uh so funnily enough my my next uh real experience with the simpsons arcade machine it turned out to be uh my wife her old apartment, which her roommates still live in. One of her roommates had bought a Simpsons arcade machine and put it down in the garage. who was trying to back out of the supermarket parking lot that was across the street from their house,

slammed on the gas thinking it was the brake and rocketed himself across several lanes of traffic. I saw that. And skills somehow, this is a San Francisco, you know, attached row house with a one car wide driveway, managed to skillshot himself into their driveway smashing into the car in the driveway sending the car through the garage door and into the simpsons arcade machine the simpsons arcade machine i think it still works it's just taken

some some body damage unfortunately that's sad i know that's a tragedy that that stinks but in terms of sheer circulation i can't i couldn't find any hard numbers i don't know if any are publicly available but i feel like this game and that ninja turtles arcade game the first one they had the one of the biggest circulations of all arcade games even bigger than things like street fighter 2 i i would see these everywhere and i still kind of do like i'll see one with a broken monitor or like funky controls but this and the first ninja turtles game i still see places more than any other machine and people i think the thing is that people think they want a simpsons or even a niche turtles arcade machine more than they actually do because like you buy the machine and you okay i finally got the simpsons

arcade game and then you play the simpsons arcade game one time. And then you're like, oh, right. I don't actually necessarily need to play this again anymore. And so then you own the Simpsons arcade game and you probably want to sell the Simpsons arcade game a little bit later. So I think there's a little bit less demand than something that would, you know, get a lot more use out of it

or something where, you know, like buying a Donkey Kong or a out of it or something where you know like buying a donkey kong or a tempest or something like that where you're gonna build your skill up on that same game versus something that you know was really just meant to take your quarters and give you 20 minutes of entertainment and send you on your way i mean a cocktail machine that can at least double as a coffee table i've said this so many times. We can eat dinner off of his Pac-Man tonight, honey. Yeah, again. Now look, I'm still going to buy it. You can't stop me.

I'm buying that arcade. Where is it going to go, Henry? You know, over there by the closed chair. Over that way. It could be a closed arcade cabinet. Yes, I know. That is what it'll become. The first time I put like one jacket on top of it, it's like, well, that's over.

It's just a clothes thing now. It's got four joysticks for hanging. That's almost an entire week's worth of hoodies can go on 1, 2, 3, 4 right there. You're selling it to me even more now, actually. The Simpsons will be right back. Bart! Go to bed! Sure thing, Dad.

It's Bart versus the Space Mutants for your NES. Only Bart Simpson can save the Earth. Bart! Okay. Get the Simpsons game for your NES from a claim. Bart! When you really care about someone, you shout it from the mountaintops.

So on behalf of Desjardins Insurance, I'm standing 20,000 feet above sea level to tell our clients that we really care about you. We care about you. We care about you. Home and auto insurance personalized to your needs. Weird, I don't remember saying that part. Visit Desjardins.com slash care and get insurance that's really big on care.

Did I mention that we care? We hope you're enjoying a hamburger power up while listening to this break. And a big thank you to our guest chris kohler this week everybody should check out his newly relaunched podcast good job brain and all the really cool stuff he does on twitter please follow kohler on twitter and if you enjoyed this week's podcast please check out our patreon because that's where me and bob do this as our full-time jobs thanks to supporters there patreon.com slash talking simpsons is your source for tons of exclusive content too if you go up to that five buck a month level not only

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We just finished our summer of Disney Renaissance, where we covered Hercules, Hunchback of Notre Dame, and The Lion King. And coming this next month, we're doing The Road to El Dorado, the 2000 Overlook classic, co-directed by simpsons legend david silverman there is a giant back catalog over 150 hours of what a cartoon movie podcast at your fingertips if you go up to that ten dollar level in addition to all the five dollar things i just talked about check it all out at once more patreon.com slash talking simpsons. Now, I guess we would go into deeper detail on this on Retronauts, but I will say the people who made this game, a lot of them would go on to form uh the studio treasure who made a lot of very quirky games in fact the person did the music for the game norio hanzawa would be like treasure's music person and and the person who designed the characters for the game the very attractive uh off model they're off model but they're very cute yes yes sushi takano, creator of the Sonic-like Sparkster.

So the creator of Sparkster for Konami did the character designs for this game. Again, they are off-model, but I like the cute mishmash of a Japanese sensibility with the Matt Groening thing. Like it never happened again. Yeah.

Right, right. And it's all really good. It's really well, you know, the animation, the graphics are so well designed. The music is great and catchy. The gameplay is fun you know it's this game could have been crap and you know they some some other arcade game maker could have done it instead it was done by like this a team at konami and it's really really good yes in terms of just the sheer amount of animations

especially for the time just look at these these sprite sheets for this game just the amount of things the characters can do the amount of attacks they have the amount of ways they can get hurt the amount of ways they can get just tangled up in their own weapons they thought of a condition for everything yeah i mean you compare it to ninja turtles where each turtle is virtually the same except for you know the weapon and then meanwhile you have a full family each with their own like dimensions and size and movements and then who all have a full family each with their own like dimensions and size and movements and then who all have their own co-op attacks like it's uh much denser uh design wise like just art design wise although i will say the one strange thing about so we've been doing this podcast for like six years now so upon starting this game i'm like oh is my podcast

starting because it's the same music and then when you get to the japanese boss uh you're like oh it's commercial time on talking simpson that's right now i associate that music with our podcast unfortunately and in case you're wondering that's where it comes from people have asked us in the past it's fun it was fun to do arcade music as the opening for a podcast plus we me and bob had a video game podcasting background when we started the show. And so I think, too, it was like video game music is basically public domain. We can just put this at the start. Who's going to sue us? Nobody. No, don't sue us, please.

But, yeah, I guess from looking at your notes, Bob, the music guy, Hanzala, has to be like the most notable know notable dude of the uh the developers uh listed in here yeah yeah like soundtracks for things like gunstar heroes and dynamite heady and mischief makers and this is a very catchy soundtrack that doesn't actually rely too much on the simpsons theme yeah it kind of weaves in and out but it's not like uh annoying but unlike uh all acclaimed games other than bart versus space mutants they paid for the elfman song yeah yeah i'm just thinking of all the reimaginings of that when they didn't feel like paying and they're just they're all very painful in 1991 for this uh like you mentioned you know a japanese aesthetic to very american style drawings this was a great time for that because you know tiny toon adventures was all the rage in 1991 and that the best episodes of that are tms

the animators for like lupin and detective conan doing looney tune style animation and it's just this great combo of styles that that works so well and i think you see a lot of that in the simpsons game too like the the action of like just the drawing of Homer's like uppercuts like is just so like cool looking. Or Bart's hopping swing of his skateboard. Like it's like poetry in motion to me. I don't know. They're also giving a lot of peace signs in this game.

So you can tell it's from Japan. Also the art design wise, I did September, hoping that we'd do this, on Twitter, I tried to see if Bill Morrison, the Simpsons artist, had any extra insight into this. Because in case you don't know, Bill Morrison, who is a legendary comic artist and graphic designer in his own right, do you remember the vhs cover to basically any simpsons release or the vhs cover to even the little mermaid he did that like that

was bill morrison uh and he did so much of the simpsons merch back then so i asked him on twitter like did you work on this and he said no he did not even though he did the cover art for part versus space mutants didn't work on this uh then do you he did not even though he did the cover art for part versus spacemans didn't work on this uh then do you know who would have done the art for this and these these cut scenes because it's definitely off model at times uh and he says some are just you know straight up taken out of the 1990 style guide they would send licensors of like if you wonder why there was like the same five drawings of Lisa you'd see on t-shirts during Bartmania, that's because these are the approved drawings of Lisa that are in the

style guide. So he figures the animators just in Japan probably just had the style guide in front of them, just grabbed them out and had character designs. And then stuff like Homer bumping into Smithers at the very start, his best guest was at the time they just had a stable of unnamed claskey chupo artists on the animation side who would take side work of like hey can you just draw this original thing and then we'll send it to japan and they'll digitize it this game feels like more than any other game of this era they did work directly with claskey chupo and even matt graining and one mystery was solved for me because uh for my life i was i was asking the question why does does Lisa have a jump rope in this game like her thing is a saxophone she's not known for her jump roping abilities in the show and then a few years ago a fan of the show

gifted me this vintage mug with Lisa jumping rope and it says overachiever and proud of it so I was like they were probably given a lot of merchandising images as well as like oh Lisa has a jump rope in this thing she could use a jump rope as a weapon yeah yeah totally that yeah i when you can definitely tell i i have lots of guesses of like oh why this thing happened in the game here why that but i i definitely think matt graining was more involved in this than he was in some of the like home games that we played in our youths as well i think i think too he just had the real, like, it was probably novel for him. Like, oh, this is the first time I get to make calls on a video game. So I'm going to do some fun stuff.

And, I mean, of course, the inclusion of all the life and health stuff, like, that's a separate license from The Simpsons. So he had to give that in addition to The Simpsons license. Yeah. Yeah, it wasn't a cute cameo on the title screen. You see life and hell characters, copyright Mac raining. There's even the Mac rating signature at the bottom of the title screen. I mean,

at that, you know, at that time, you know, I kind of important to remember, right. I mean, I'm sure your audience can put the,

put the, do the math on this one, but you know, with this game coming out in the beginning of 1991, that means it was developed, you know, in 1990, which means that they had, as far as like

reference materials, they had like the first season of The Simpsons, right? I mean, that's basically what it's based on. So there's not a whole lot of material to draw off of, as we'll see, I think, as we start going stage by stage here, probably including the Life in Hell characters, they were like, oh, like, these are recognizable characters. We should, you know, maybe add these in as well to give, you know, people more things that they might recognize that they might say, oh, that's cool. We should, you know, let's play this game. Just because when you start looking, there's very few characters from The Simpsons that they really could put into this game.

There is Blinky the Three-Eyed Fish, which is season two. But fundamentally, you know, it's sort of a season one video game. into this game there there is blinky the three-eyed fish which is season two um but but fundamentally yeah you know it's sort of a season one video game with uh with the way production works in the show they're working nine months ahead of time so i have to assume that probably konami might have had uh half of season two production materials in terms of characters in fact it's interesting to see in this game what the game does first before the show like a thing about zombies or a thing about an amusement park i just feel like those are those are cool ideas for a video game but the show would eventually do them on their own as like episodes or segments and and i also like that you can spot some stuff

from the shorts like this is one of the last times the shorts would be used for any kind of content instead of just like ignored in existence they like there's there's some moments where they have to go like well what's a gorilla look like well they drew a gorilla in the shorts so let's go with that oh yeah yeah the pink gorilla yeah when the game got re-released uh briefly on home consoles yes that's when we got to see the the japanese version of it that most americans probably never played it has some minor changes that make the game a lot easier and what actually i found slightly shocking is that especially for a game that's japan only there is now a nuclear bomb super weapon that kills everything on the screen usually in japan

they don't like that kind of content in their game for obvious reasons there are things taken out of like the fallout series that involve nuclear weapons you can guess why yeah that so to add the nuclear bomb for the japanese my you know my guess there is a lot of my guesses come to matt graining wanted blank or blank i i will also say that uh when we interviewed paul provenzano who was uh one of the executive producers on the acclaim era of simpsons games. He said an internal joke they had was Groening rhymes with complaining. Yes. So we know that Groening

had lots of notes on stuff. I could see that they made the, you know, it wasn't, it was pretty normal to have and clear the area attack move in a brawler like this. So I could see Groening looking at a picture of Bart Simpson

throwing an atomic bomb and i'm saying i don't want bart simpson to throw an atomic bomb in my game yeah i mean or it could be as simple as i mean it came out it came out first and they had a few it came out first in the u.s and then they had a few more months uh to just work on the japanese version and you could you know you could work on arcade games you know up until you know they were very close to release because then you're just burning some new EEPROM. Because, again, you don't have to manufacture 2 million of these things, right? You're putting out like 5,000 boards out into the world. So you burn a few chips, you're done.

So I would imagine that they just kept working on it and added that in but then never went back and replaced. They could have gone back and said, oh, okay, it's the Simpsons arcade game, you know, version 1.5 for the US, and they upgrade it. And, you know, they've done that with arcade games in the past and added in things, but they probably just didn't do that. And they probably just decided

they had a few more months to work on the Japanese version. Let's add something that clears out enemies. Let's add some other fun stuff. And it's probably as simple as that. Well, because the bomb is present as an attack from Burns. So the bomb is there. Yeah, maybe it's possible it just didn't work as an attack item at the time it had to ship in the U.S.

Before we go level by level, the characters each, I just love all their designs. Like Bart has his advertising blue shirt design, which I guess also speaks to the whole, yeah, they got this out of the advertising character design book. His weapon is easy to figure out. What's he do in the opening? Oh, he skateboards. Well, he can move around on a skateboard and hit people with a skateboard. It's great.

And Homer's just a brawler. I like that. people like it uh homer didn't get into fights too much in season one but this this homer here feels more like the you know the brother from the same planet homer who just gets into like a five minute long battle quiet man style marge of course uses a vacuum cleaner because she's the mom yeah you know what it's funny and I do like that so we know MacRainey had some influence on this game or some input on this game because we can see

in two instances and we talked about this before but the original joke MacRainey had for the show is that Marge was secretly a life in hell rabbit and she has rabbit ears under her giant hair in the game you can see that in two instances if you attack too quickly with a vacuum cleaner she'll get her hair caught and you can see

the bottoms of the ears being pulled upwards and then when she gets electrocuted by one of the enemies you can see the rabbit ears as part of her skeleton so that joke was not written out of the show yet matt greening still had that planned for the show while this game was being made it's so funny when you hear him on like a 2002 or 3 commentary and somebody some old writer says hey matt wasn't your plan that marge would have buddy years and he's like did i tell you that i'm so like he's he's embarrassed that he had that as an idea now he's like no that's not it anymore i like that this is the only life in hell video game because bongo and binky are both in it yeah they're they're all over the place like they're just fun i i would bet grading just

drew those yeah i think you uh you you maybe said that earlier on the podcast or before we recorded that i want a tattoo of binky as the grim reaper i think in the opening of the cemetery level i like the binky with yeah the magic eyes like him in the suit and the cemetery level. I like the binky with the magic eyes, like him in the suit and his mind control beam eyes. I love that. I think those are drunk eyes. That's what I read it as. Oh, okay.

Someone slipped him a Mickey. And yes, this game did have the involvement of four of the voice actors of the main six in it. Yes. As always, Harry Shearer. Sorry, not Henry always henry uh harry shearer sorry not henry shearer harry shearer does not like to play ball he never did and i'm guessing they weren't paid for this we were talking about before the show it seems like there was a recording harry shearer wasn't there hey guys you got this fax from this video game company can you say these five things

and these are original uh lines of dialogue from all the actors not credited but it is them that did not happen in the ninja turtles games those are just people they're not the voice actors from the show i mean around the same time the bart versus space means has like two words from nancy cartwright shoved in there as well from the show though oh yeah they are just digitized from the show yeah i these original things it feels it feels like this weird informal time or even though they're all involved in these like billion dollar deals that you could just say like hey isn't it fun to be in a video game just like you know just say a quick line is homer just say homer all right thanks like they uh if if harry shearer turned it down because it's like this is not official and i should be

paid real money for it he was correct he was He was correct. Hank Azaria wasn't a regular on the show by mid 1990 so I could see him just not recording. There was also a weird period of time in the show's beginning in which the cast members were trying to disguise their identities so like if Dan Castaneda was being interviewed he'd have a baseball hat on and sunglasses.

They stopped that as soon as that episode happened where they credited every person as the character. That's when they stopped doing that but there was some weird air of mystery in the beginning of the show yeah that was weird I don't understand that way of thinking I yeah I guess that's old money we're coming up

to it soon in our season 2 return I guess they really felt like I mean you know could also have just been like well we need Homer we need Bart we need Lisa we need marge and that's all we actually really need need uh as far as voices and that's that uh but yes i have all their voice clips right here so wonderful oh man whenever i hear welcome to my world yeah i enjoy it that's classic smithers uh well well let's start with old Homer Homer there you go that's his name up and at him

yes I'm fried Maggie hey come back here with my kid very compressed there you go I thought Homer said up and let's go yeah that's so funny hearing him say up and adam that's uh these yeah that that one as a kid i always thought it was yeesh i'm blind that was the one i never i that they were a bit garbled even there yeah you got the the noise of

the arcade the noise of the game and all the characters in the very glorious intro that approximates a small portion of the Simpsons intro. They all have character bios like the Ninja Turtles game. Homer is still his season one age of 35. Yep. And his hobbies include bowling a big one. And his famous catchphrase is, y'ello. Y'ello. Yes.

We all know that. Everyone knows. Then here's all the Bart sound clips. Yellow. Yes. Yeah, we all know that. Everyone knows. Then here's all the Bart sound clips. Bart. Who the hell are you? All right, let's go for it, man. Maggie. I'm toastified, man.

Okie dokie. Hey, man. Help. Help. Wow. So there you go. Hey, man. Help! Wow! So there you go. That toastified man, even though it says it on the screen, I still was like, or also, hey, let's go for it, man. Those both, I did not get them as a child.

That compression wipes out most meaning. So Bart, age 10, hobby, instigating disobedience. That feels like a macarooning line. Oh, yeah. did not get them as a child that compression wipes out uh most meaning so bart h10 hobby instigating disobedience that feels like a macaroning line oh yeah uh his catchphrase is yo man and he is known as albarto and the bart man the bart man yeah it's uh you thought there'd be a little more bart man involvement in this but i mean i uh thank you bob again i'm pointing at it over there you you can't see that chris but i got uh bob made a very nice gift uh to celebrate our 100th episode uh he got a pixel art version of the bart man dropping into screens sprite from this because i just love that so much yeah i mean i'm not even a superhero guy but i want figures of all the superhero versions

of the simpsons you see when they fly back onto the screen after they come back to life. They're so cool. It's a touch, a little nice little touch that would never be in any other game. It's so great because they already had Bartman as the merchandised machine because just Batman was big in 1989. So sell a T-shirt that says Bartman on it. We'll make our own bootlegs. Yeah. So they had Bartman and they just had to go like

well what is what's homer's superhero identity well since then every character i think has had like five different superhero identities like lisa's clobber girl homer became the pie man uh you know i don't did marge ever become a superhero that's i feel like she never got to be one but if there's like a season 28 one i'm forgetting uh but uh bartman still still great uh so yeah the that we've got little lisa hey no fair let's get him dad that's my sister mister maggie and of course her catchphrase on the uh attract mode is embrace nothingness from dead putting society when she's meditating with bart that's right yeah and hobby wailing on her saxophone although she's not doing that in this game.

Yeah, she is scared of it or has nightmares of it. But yeah, the Lisa, I will, I didn't play as Lisa in the emulated thing, but I watched a four-player playthrough and I never considered it as a kid, but there is something weird about watching Lisa get punched by adult men the entire game. I can see why they uh well lisa wasn't like a lead in video games after this too often also just the rampant sexism of video games and how they were sold back then yeah very seldom do you get playable lisa

especially playable marge oh yeah yeah well because i mean if you're a guy in a boardroom you say like no boy wants to play as their mom in a video game, and that's just how it is. But they needed a fourth player, and I'm glad Marge gets to be playable. Why don't we hear all Marge's clips? I'm sure Julie Kavner's voice will be only better in compression. Marge, how's my hair? Whoa, look out, world. All right, look out world is what she says when she like eats a hamburger yes oh that's right why does she say that that's the food that's the food

she's uh full of calories and ready to rumble marge aged age 34 a hobby making tasty gelatin desserts she did that once yeah and then she shares the attract mode screen with maggie age one uh and then she's she did turn 34 in the uh life on the fast lane so that's accurate for the time yeah i i i feel it's funny too that all of them have to have a thing of like well this is when your character's burned because there's a moment where a character is lit on fire and then you have to react to it. My flesh is sloughing off my body. Well, that's all about TMNT. Like, that's in TMNT. Who put the lights out?

Yeah, exactly. And same with, like, the characters smack into the screen for a very funny drawing. Just like in the TMNT 89 as well. I was shocked in your research bob that like there were few people who were credited on tmnt that worked on this because it it follows the pattern or the the format so much yeah i was shocked by that but yeah not a lot of crossover and i believe uh turtles in time the second ninja turtles arcade game came out around the same time like roughly in the same month as this so they were really putting these games out and i think they they kind of shared um if you look at like turtles in time

and this as opposed to turtles from you know two years prior there's some graphical upgrades there's more done i may be misspeaking here there but i think there's more with like uh sprite scaling uh you know making things come into and out of the screen you know other little technical you know advancements of the boards that this and turtles in time i think share because they were probably just developed simultaneously after the first turtles if i had to guess are the same arcade boards the same like technology yeah yeah yeah well also you look at the simpsons four-player machine and the turtles three four- player machine from 89 like it's made to be re-skinned it's made to turn you know your turtles machine into a simpsons machine yeah yeah and

every character's got a pair of combo moves together i have a new appreciation for the margin bart one because he just becomes like a bouncing off the screen like projectile he hits everything from one side to the other and you activate that by standing next to each other and not moving for a few seconds it's not advertised on the arcade machine and it's not uh shown to you in the like a track mode so like when i was playing in the arcade kids had to be like hey look what we can do like they show it was like a little secret kind of thing yeah and that's great that yeah that like every combination of characters has their own move i I mean, that's really cool. I love the homer.

Especially because there's no individual super moves. There's jump and attack, and then you can do whatever sort of jump kick or jump attack. And then actually, if you press the buttons together simultaneously, which in the Turtles games, I believe, it does a special attack that sucks up your health. Yeah, yeah. In The Simpsons, it does not. But it actually is, it seemed to me in my testing to be a more powerful attack because it seems to take out grunt-level enemies in one hit as opposed to like two or three hits.

So actually, it seemed like using that was, but the risk-reward of it was that it kind of leaves you vulnerable because you're not like high up in the air away from all the other enemies you're still kind of low to the ground so if you with it you're you're kind of um it's and it's a slow move you know you're uh you're a target but if you hit it you you do some damage and everybody's got a really cool dive kick i like especially homer's dive kick i love drawing on that one of the big novelty factors of this game especially for the time is there's so many things to pick up and throw.

And there's so many like unique food power-ups that they all do the same thing. But it's like, here's a hot dog. Here's a hamburger. Here's like pizza or whatever. They just, there's a lot of variety and things that all kind of function the same way. How we use electricity can be smarter, cleaner, and greener. At Electric Ireland, we can help guide you there. You see, our new Net Zero Hub

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a weapon you can pick them up and throw them at things and you have like one good shot at it too because if you whiff i think they fly off the screen they don't stick around so you have to use them correctly and uh you and smash somebody with them. There's secret food items. You can hit the trees and things like that. And then if you keep hitting the tree after the food item comes out, one of the life and hell rabbits emerges with a sign that says, all gone, beat it.

Yeah, I had to hit every tree to see that sign as a kid. I was a very complacent kid. I think this is the game also that if you if you just stay on the screen when there's no enemies and the little the little finger will stop pointing and then it'll start attacking you too yeah i love that yeah i also the game is much noisier than even i remembered yeah i watch uh just doing my single player playthrough i was like boy hey look out for me. Hey, look out for me. Like, just all that noise. And then when I watched a four-player version of it,

like, every character is just making noise every second. I mean, imagine, like, this needs to be in an arcade. It needs to attract the most attention. So when you hear that, like, the Simpsons, it's calling to you as a nine-year-old from across the room. It's so important, too, because, like, that attract mode is so important for arcade games. And this game had an amazing attract mode right i mean the fact that because again the home games they're they're not going to have that perfect you know they're i mean perfect

you know very compressed but they're not going to be able to play the opening notes of the simpsons with the chorus and the you know the have it look so perfect um the the little clips from the show's intro the music i mean that that attract mode was very attractive yeah that's another one where they learn from tmnt like when i heard the i was like well okay run run to that like right now it's and same with this yeah uh well yeah i guess i mean let's start with the opening you know the elfman score they can recreate some shots of uh the opening but usually it's just like here's bart jumping out of the school now the bart bio here's homer taking off his uh work uh outfit and now here's homer's bio lisa plays the saxophone here's lisa bio marge and maggie driving here's marge bio it's very clever and

just how little is actually moving but it still kind of convinces you you're watching the opening and when i downloaded the uh the rom for this because you can't but you can't play this legally anymore it's not available you didn't save your playstation 3 with it they downloaded forever no i my ps3 is actually hooked up to my tv but i never bought it for that but yeah when you download the rom it's like four megabytes. So that's all of this information just crammed into that little amount of space. I guess that was a lot of information back then. Yes, it was.

And they do the couch gag of Maggie falling onto Marge's lap. That was first seen in Moaning Lisa. And also Bart's hand is like really his wrist out of his left hand is drawn very weird there there's i did notice that yeah it begins with uh smithers doing what we all know him to do robbing a jewelry store yes oh yeah this is that i mean obviously there's some there's there's there's you know there's some stuff that's off model there's some stuff that's a little weird the i mean absolutely the weirdest weirdest part of this whole game, right, is that the plot is Smithers is 100% an evil villain who robs a jewelry store

because that's, you know, what he does. Of course, the diamond that he was trying to rob gets swapped with Maggie's pacifier. So he kidnaps Maggie and takes her away on his helicopter which is of course absolutely a recognizable smithers move if I've ever heard of it well the power plant needs funding and that's the only way to do it no I love this mad bomber smithers in fact Henry and I both have the same t-shirt design with him on it like throwing the bombs everywhere that somebody made mine was clean today i had to warn it i didn't and this smithers is the white jacket smithers the first smithers it's just like lupin there's white jacket smithers and there's green jacket smithers green jacket smithers is the the current smithers yeah so in

the first appearance of smithers uh he is a black man with a white jacket in his second appearance in no disgrace like home he's given the yellow skin and he still has his white coat by his third appearance in telltale head he will be in his full tan suit so this is the only other appearance of yellow skin white coat smithers uh in in simpson stuff though he's also given like a black uh cape which very stylish i love that yes full of full of the bob because he is the um jumping ahead he's the he's the prelude to the to the boss fight with with with who we don't really know who the boss fight will will be at that at that point we can of guess. But yes, he throws bombs at you and says, I think, as you said earlier,

welcome to my world. That doesn't mean anything. I don't know why he said that. No, the world of getting bombs thrown in your face. And Burns uses the phrase suckers, which we'll hear later, which is funny. Welcome to your grave, suckers. Well, here's the...

Yeah, well, okay. Here's the smithereens sounds. them here okay all right welcome to my world you know what that laugh sounds like something that dan castellaneta did for them i absolutely think it's dan castellaneta yeah i i i'm with you there bob yeah the well i mean if if you are in the let's design a ninja turtles game for simpsons mindset and you see smithers and burns in the character pack like i can see you thinking well that's our shredder and krang that's there's their shredder the mini boss beforehand and krang the final boss that's exactly how this game works too the last level is just a two boss boss rush yeah uh and when he robs the jewelry store he's surrounded by

nondescript henchmen who you know predate you know fat tony's crew from season three or even crusher and low blow our favorite goons i love these like lionel hutz looking goons you fight smithers has like just an entire horde of goons that are just populating the streets every every place you go they're after you you know there's very clear like every now and again like when you get to um uh it's like oh you're it's like here comes crusty the clown and you have to fight him but then when he dies he he's his sprite is replaced by a goon sprite it was just a goon dressed up as don't worry folks we're not really beating up uh yeah the uh well i mean also like this starting with an introductory kidnapping like uh in part because

of you know the popularity in japan of the film streets of fire you start these beat-em-ups with a kidnapping like that that that film had such a cult popularity that you know games like final fight and double dragon kunio kun like those those all took from that like oh that started with a woman being kidnapped and then a guy fights gang members until he frees her let's do that let's do the game like that cool movie that stays as a constant in a beat-em-up so that even in this is like well i guess we'll kidnap maggie we can't kidnap marge i guess it's maggie we need four players yeah then it's stage one begins and i think just like in barton the space mutants this is where they kind of front load it with uh familiar stuff though they do keep the kind of reference characters or familiar faces they're sprinkled throughout but

it's really big in this intro part you walk by abe and patty and selma who both kind of look like they just melded into one person in a palette swap like they're not neither looks right they walk by the rusty barnacle first scene in homer's night out noiseland arcade first scene in uh moaning lisa and howie is there the classic simpsons character howie howie the game master he's the one who'll smack you through the wall on the door uh you see the hamster that bart turned green and bart the genius in the window at the pet store and then you see old skinny boy and martin prince standing in front of that wiener graffiti and i really like that you can pick up the bus sign from the season one opening and throw it i like that and i think if you have four players

you can pick up the cop car oh i think you can actually pick up and throw the cop car if you have four players or two maybe i was trying it just by myself i didn't know oh man i wish i didn't see uh the only the four player playthrough i watched didn't try to grab that cop car i want to watch the simpsons throw and destroy a cop car that sounds fun no no wigum but you do fight evil firemen yes yeah are we to believe those are actual dangerous firemen or that one of the goons stole fireman equipment one of uh i mean birds does have a lot of goons and you know another really cool thing i like is twice is starting in this stage they tease that father sonson gangster boss fight. Like, they walk in and then walk out.

Oh, yeah, I was going to mention that in that I was looking at the cutting room floor wiki, which goes over a lot of, you know, what was cut from games, what's, you know, buried in the data. Apparently, the short gangster and the tall gangster were going to be regular enemies because there are different versions of them

color-wise in the data. So I think they just needed a boss for something so like all right take them out of the game they will eventually be a boss so they were going to be mixed into the standard roster of enemies at one point in the game's development okay i like them as a boss fight but i do like those as the original characters they're funny and uh and also yeah when you walk by noiseland arcade they've got to sign up for this simpsons game which likes the simpsons new game which i guess the official name for this game is the simpsons yeah it's not the simpsons yeah yeah which is funny because you know and then we'll see it later on as well the uh the actual the the in-game arcade cabinet too so they were thinking ahead there then you can steal sherry

or terry's burger uh she also is not colored there's there's a lot of times where i'm like well i guess probably the color uh choices were limited and so that's why they like or because sherry is um typical yellow skin color not the pale skin color that she normally is and then they face professor von braun who uh had not no he had premiered in an episode right before this that was bartha daredevil so warner von braun uh inexplicably is the boss because like the studio lights come down over the springfield bridge i guess is that the suicide bridge oh yeah that is where homer tries to kill himself yeah yeah or takes his boulder for a walk yeah and inexplicably you do fight the wrestler from barth the daredevil so a big problem with this uh game uh at least this point in the series there weren't a lot of villains and i find it

inexplicable that sideshow bob is not a villain in this game yeah he gives you like a power-up he gives you like a mallet right a full turkey oh turkey like a roast turkey yeah yeah why i will give it to uh bart versus space means there that they identified better villains like you fight nelson in it and you fight it would be weird if homer and march beat up nelson so i want to see it but yeah why why not sideshow bob that's that's wacky to me yeah one other thing i was thinking about while playing replaying this game is that uh current simpsons are very big on hey remember when we did this we're gonna reference that i think a big treat for millennials would be if they just adapted this arcade game as an episode that would be a hoot and i think everyone would love it

totally yeah but maggie maggie gets kidnapped by by Smithers and then they all comment on the oddness of it all. Yeah. Like why is, well, why is Moe's underground now? Also, by the time of 1991, I understood that a blinking red boss means he's about to die. And the more red blinks, the better. And that was really, I mean, I think that the idea behind that particular mechanic was when you get into those boss fights, like after you do like a couple of hits, the boss starts blinking. And it's really just to try to get you to feed more money and like, hey, you're all you almost beat this boss blinking.

Don't you want to put another quarter and you're so close? You're almost there, really. But I mean, even when the boss is is blinking it's not necessarily the case that uh that you're that you're gonna even do it on the next quarter it's just a big tease to try to get you to put in more so you can see what the next level is because nobody really knew what the next level was after that so you know it's like i gotta see what it is it could be anything who knows yeah i then uh want you to feed him and there's a cheering crowd, which makes me wonder if this was televised. And the first time you get to see the Wien animation dance of everybody, Homer's is the best, which I definitely think was from the character,

like the licensor pack of like, here's a, because it's like an ad you can see for new episodes. Homer, celebrate dance kind of thing. The others are harder to identify, but I would bet they come from similar character packs of just Bart hopping up and down to be like, yeah. And yeah,

depending on who you play as, that's where you hear Homer's like, come back with my, come back here with my kid. And it's a very weird shot of like everybody, the back of people on the edge of the bridge, looking at the crusty balloon fly away. It's a weird, it's always a weird angle on the Simpsons, the backs of the bridge looking at the crusty balloon fly away it's a weird it's

always a weird angle on the simpsons the backs of the heads yeah and then we get bonus stage number one which uh that's another thing the game kind of mixes around with sometimes it's the green shirt crusty from the shorts and other times it's purple shirt crusty uh from season one uh but like on the balloon it's kind of green shirt and on the it's green shirt crusty on from season one uh but like on the balloon it's kind of green shirt and on the it's green shirt crusty on the bonus stage graphic as well these balloon popping mini games drove me crazy because my brother was always better than me and i never won them it's a young man's game and it's a nice show off of like this the sprite scaling technology and i like the simpsons all fly there on balloons that are in the shape of their own heads yeah yeah no the squashing and stretching of a sprite was very impressive in

1991 we all marveled at it yeah the people younger than us it's like wow the sprite it's scrunched and then uh we're at crusty land so there have been many depictions of amusement parks on the simpsons this is before any of them but crusty land as an entity is that the name of the amusement park at universal studios it is okay yes uh so in i i tried to look up the history of crusty land as far as the concept of crusty the clown having his own disney land type thing because you know in season two crusty does a whole bunch of shows for mount splashmore and they go to duff gardens in season three or sometimes they go to itchy and scratchy land uh in camp crusty they do make a

reference to euro crusty land all right one of the euro disney jokes but that's kind of it uh in universe and this i guess is debatable because like how in canon is the ride as opposed to an episode of the show? But it wasn't until the Simpsons ride in 2008, 2009, that Krusty Land became a true real thing. Though this is the first version of it, too. Though then there's also signs in the background that say Springfield Amusement Park, not Krusty Land. Yeah, that is true. Not a lot of Krusty presence in this game uh less than i thought there would be i mean he is technically the boss of this stage but uh yeah it just it

feels like a missed opportunity yeah and you beat up guys dressed like crusty who bounce off of uh balls balls and stuff well uh i mean i guess we'll get to it there's a darker implication in this game that crusty is dead because to go to uh the elevator that goes to most tavern you have to go into crusty's grave oh i forgot that grave said the grave says crusty and there's like a clown headstone so this game's like oh no crusty died oh my god these are his helpers you know he always had heart problems or it's just the first time he faked his death before oh yeah that's another of the important parts of this game that feel like uh perhaps a graining request of like well you can beat up a you can draw a guy that looks like crusty but you didn't beat up crusty you can beat up somebody who looks like

binky but then it's a guy in a costume you know and also this is where you can spot otto and marvin monroe at the concession stand there's also this weird uh proto baby gerald in this stage you'll let you see him in most so fucking weird yeah i never noticed that baby until this time the baby's like crawling behind the train you can barely see it then he's later he's at mo so i'm like this is a weird ass like shorts baby or like life life in hell baby i think you're meant to think that it's uh maggie because it's sort of obscured and it looks like maggie but then you know the the face is revealed it's like oh oh that's not maggie yeah that's what i guess the gut the the intended joke is yeah this this is also where santa's little helper first appears

and is used as a weapon happily nothing nothing happens to you just chuck him like a football and uh and then this is also right after this is where you meet millhouse he gives you a hammer which is really good at beating up those teacups like that's i i also hate the the hammers again remind me of sibling rivalry of just battling with my brother like no i'm getting the hammer like that's fine i mean i mean also the process of playing a game like this with a brother or well let's just say a sibling is that you each just take every food item you can. Even if there's no time for negotiation to say, like, no, I need it more. It's just like, oh, I saw the burger first.

There, mine. But, yeah, the teacup ride, that's a cute joke. It's fine. And then we get to see the tease of the father and son again. The Krusty Land also has zoo animals as well like it's like it's like disney world yeah but yeah that is like the pink gorilla from the shorts yeah it's from throw shit at homer correct does throw shit at homer yeah it's the uh the omen short the season two almond short zoo story uh where the family goes to the zoo and the joke is

that there are you know five apes that all look like them though this is the only the homer ape uh and yes that's the one who throws a brown substance into homer's face let's say they don't say what it is it could be anything you sound like the host of double dare right now yeah a storytelling thing i never noticed until now but the bear escapes that will appear in like stage five it busts out that it's the one that will scare smithers at the start of the forest stage and crusty really locked down the life and hell characters there's a bit there's a binky show happening and a giant like mouth of binky you enter into for these binky shows that happen from 10 from 10 to 7 kids love comics about

disaffected adults uh and and this is when you see some of the smooth criminal enemies the first of the michael jackson references which i mean michael jackson was just everywhere at the time so it was probably just a cool thing to do but also while working on this game matt greening was working with michael jackson on the do the bart man song so i do wonder if there's if it is like this in the thing is it meant to be a wink to his then friend michael jackson which was a totally normal thing to have at the time i think it's just inescapable pop culture reference it's like people will know what this is and think it's funny yeah yeah and then we get another squash and stretch boss fight

this time against a crusty balloon and uh oh yeah this is also when you can get hot dogs from Sherry and Terry, a combo of hot dogs. And Snowball 2. Oh, yeah, and the Snowball 2 to throw, yeah. This boss, it's not the most imaginative thing. There are two bosses in this game that are just kind of orbs that bounce around. But I do like the sound of the bouncing in this giant Krusty Balloon. Yeah, oh, right, yeah, because yeah because yeah the the giant crusty balloon was good there's another boss that we'll get to that i thought was pretty lazy i don't know if

lazy is the right word but you know um pretty uh deflating and uh this is when everybody falls it's the first of two giant falls in the game you need those because it's always uh it shows what characters are playing at the time, right? So, I mean, it swaps out for, yeah. So, for me, it was just Marge falling alone. It is interesting and, like, it's another little neat touch in that they try to connect these environments in some way. It's like, well, now you're falling to this or now you're running to this. They don't need to do it.

They could just be isolated levels and you're just having fun with the Simpsons. But they do try to connect them in some way. And so, there we move on to stage three the very graining named discount cemetery i got springfield discount cemetery and i i think it's a funny little bit of animation that they fall through that tree and all smack on their face no matter which character you're playing as they smack on their face when they land and i i spotted the frogs there's just frogs walking around in here. They're based on the design of Bart's frog from Crepes of Wrath. And this is where it's kind of like the ghost guys falling out of the tree. That feels like one of those culturally Japanese touches to me.

I don't know. I don't think of like a haunted house in America having ghosts hanging in trees. The hanging from tree thing feels uh different connotations in america that is true that is true yeah yeah and uh i also if i could complain about the level design here it's like the trees obscure way too much of your vision for part of this level like it's just it's too big a tree this this is one of the coolest original levels because they're like let's just do a horror level and this predates the dial z for zombies uh segment of trios of horror so they were first damn it and these zombies are so cool they do the thriller dance it's a very fun stage and i like how the

regular enemies that you fight previously are now freaked out yeah yeah there's i kept thinking like oh there's a reveal that the zombies aren't real it's like no they they're all real these things are real in this cemetery another thing that occurs to me um you know we're talking about we're getting deeper into the game from a gameplay perspective is that um you know we talk about oh well you know you have to start this game you see the first level and then if you know you have to feed all these these tokens into it to you know to be able to see everything but because it was a four-playerplayer game, you could see a full game of this being played, even if one person didn't want to credit feed it to the end, because people could come and go. Somebody could join in at any time, grab a controller and start playing, and then they could keep playing.

And then if you ran out of money, somebody else could come in and continue. And you could have that sort of like, you know know a progression of people to the point where you actually you could go to the arcade and see people beating this game but it might not be the people who started the game it did really disturb me as a little kid seeing the uh the pink shirt fat guy just get doing the uh the the dan castellaneta maniacal laugh as green ghosts all fly around him. I'm also surprised why you don't fight those ghosts. They design those ghosts, but they're not enemies you can fight.

I like the slightly edgy touch in that you fight all these zombies and you go into a bar. They couldn't have this bar level in a Nintendo console game. They wouldn't allow it. That's true. Of course, it wouldn't be an arcade beat-em-up

if you didn't have an elevator stage that took you to that next area. That'll kill some time. I believe in, I mean, you're right. You know, with Bart versus the Space Mutants, you actually can't go into Moe's bar. That's right. You can only be outside of it, yeah. Yeah, those Nintendo sensors, how dare they and i want i guess you can

still call mo in there you can yeah right but you don't but by not being able to go in there you don't have to deal with you know well what are these bottles of liquor on the yeah you know because you couldn't have you could not have liquor in the game and i believe it just says mo's outside yeah because they couldn't they couldn't even imply it was a bar i'm sure there was a lot of back and forth with that yep and uh this underground elevator section too it does remind me in the joke in my sister my sitter where mo made a secret very long tunnel to his place uh from the squid port that made it look like it's like hey this isn't faux dive this is a dive uh and this all you know wraps up with

this boss fight henry darkly thinks of it as a father and son that's how i view it he's the guy is shorter he's wearing his dad's clothes he's fighting with him i i i view it as a father and son boss way in in the comments i i guess you know this is one of these things as a little kid you see and you create your own storyline for it. And until I have confirmation otherwise, I will believe it is that. I love just the big bosses. And there are some cool attacks that they do. Like the little guy will jump into the big guy's shoulders.

And also the big guy will grab the little guy's tie and like kind of do a yo-yo attack with him. Like he'll use the smaller guy as a weapon sometimes. And you can beat one or the other first right like yeah yeah that's uh that's a neat like multi-stage to that boss too i guess you know it sort of works like uh rocks bebop and rocksteady as well in in tmnt that's true that's true yeah and and so yes you they basically operate as the doorman to stage four most tavern most tavern has never been larger or more underground yes yeah uh i had to really laugh at the very 1990 touch of a dick tracy parody poster at the entrance because as bart tracy i feel like the tracy yeah you could

have bought those at like myrtle beach those unlicensed t-shirts. Oh, yes. Oh, man. Yeah. And you already get an ad for Princess. The number of super inappropriate unlicensed t-shirts. Oh, yeah. Goodbye there. My goodness. Every t-shirt in the summer of 90 and 91 was like a mix of Ninja Turtles, Bart, Batman, and Dick Tracy. Just like all together.

Saddam Hussein in there somewhere, too. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And yeah, you're right, Bob. Moe's has never been this big, but I think they got the dank pretty well. Moe's has, like, multiple bars inside of it. It's pretty ritzy, this underground club he's got. And a roulette table, too.

Yeah. And then there's another Space Mutants poster. This game has far more accurate Space Mutants than the actual space video game and yeah you can also see mo on the phone but if you're playing as bart in the stage then who is prank calling him if not if not bart or lisa it's question he could just be taking maybe that's just a regular phone call maybe somebody has some you know business inquiries about yeah i'm watching it now and mo does not get mad after the phone call is actually the phone call does not end mo just on the phone in a loop and what is barney doing barney's just like waving his arms wildly and just like kind of like shaking i guess if you like attack him he runs off

that's what i saw he just kind of stand jitters there until you interact with him and makes him run away i mean you know i had friends who remembered the boss in this level as like and then you fight barney at the end like no no no maybe that would make more sense but you you would never beat up poor old barney though i guess this is the barney that like does punch out homer in this season he's he was more violent than other uh references we get a poster of car Carmen in the background from, uh, Bart the genius when they go see Carmen with all that really weird long

scene. Yes. Yeah. With, with, uh, not like, I think it was Russian opera version of it.

Cause it was public domain. Uh, we passed by bleeding gums, Murphy playing with three princess cashmere is on stage. Very, very sexily dancing there. The, the scene for daddy,

as they say makes total sense absolutely uh mo would never have this much entertainment there no no and then we pass by some konami in-game references to themselves uh with the reference to the 1994 player Aliens game, which I guess it's all Fox, so even a 91, that would be fine. But it's funny that a space mutant is scared off by what appears to be a xenomorph, but it's actually Marge in a mask. And then there's the Simpsons arcade game right next to it,

which apparently is a game about Homer and Marge kissing. That is actually the 1990 Aliens game, which is why they're advertising. Like, you can also play this. Yeah. And I like the little Marge joke if you watch the screen. Maybe it was their way of saying, like, once you finish this game, this one's probably next to it.

Like, go check it out. Yeah, I think I played the Aliens vs. Predator game more than I played the Aliens one as a youth. But also probably when I was nine, I was like, those are too scary. Like I, I hadn't been sold the aliens toys yet to know it wasn't too scary.

And, uh, and yes, you fight your way to the boss who is a sleeping drunk, which through us doing season one of this podcast, Bob was able to identify what character they got this. Oh, really?

Is he in season one or is he in season two you did spot him in season two but he's also you you uh you mentioned it when we did no disgrace like home but he is visible there too he is in some waiting room and no disgrace like home but also in season two uh homer versus lisa and the eighth commandment uh he is part of the group watching the game this weird skinhead looking guy and my theory was uh in japan they got an entire pack of like extra characters like here are people that are in backgrounds like okay we need a boss this guy looks like a bad guy let's make him huge and make him a drunk yeah he's uh he isn't drunk in the shot of uh yeah when the joke in no disgrace

like home is when they go to marvin monroe's clinic they walk by all the troubled families and one is a very crudely drawn skinhead family basically they're just all a pale color and the father has you know the outfit and the dotted uh buzz cut of a skinhead uh but he had very pale skin this guy is colored like a more tan yellow i'd say instead uh but yeah he's a violent drunk who breathes fire on you and kind of wobbles around which as a little kid i like i thought it was naughty like wow i'm beating up a drunk boss he's not even he's not even working for smithers he's a random wino yes yeah he just happened to fall in sleep in front of the secret elevator back up to the Butte. That takes you right to the Grand Canyon.

You know, people, this is deep video game knowledge, people were very mad about Dark Souls 2 when that came out because this elevator takes you to a seemingly inaccessible place where it shouldn't take you. The world shouldn't line up the way it should. People are like, that's why Dark Souls 2 is the worst game ever. Well, this game is even more egregious with that, where the elevator from Moe's takes you to the Springfield Mountains. Yes, yeah.

Yeah, it really doesn't make any sense. Don't base your game judgment on elevator placements. You'll never win. That thing is, I haven't engaged in any Dark Souls 2 discourse because I've only beaten one. But in one, and in Demon Dark Souls 2 discourse because I've only beaten one. But in one and in Demon's Souls, characters just show up, a bunch of flying things fly you to another area.

Like that's cheap too. Why are people mad about an elevator? It's disingenuous. But yes, so that takes us to stage five, the Springfield Butte, which as a kid I thought said bud and thought was very funny uh and almost entirely based on uh call of the simpsons right yes though there is a little bit of the original simpsons two-parter shorts maggie in peril because the cliffhanger

for that was maggie is adrift in water and falls down a waterfall. So when Maggie Smithers gets scared, he drops Maggie into the water and she starts to float away. That's from Maggie in peril in the shorts. But mostly, yes, this is Call of the Simpsons, which was like one of the most famous episodes of season one. He got a whole Burger King toy line that same year. And yeah, it's the same escaped bear from stage two uh you fight the bigfoot that looks like how homer looked like in the tabloids uh but apparently it's just a real ass bigfoot that one isn't revealed to be a guy in

a costume it's just bigfoot yeah there are some weird enemies in the stage like uh the prototype version of the rich texan this guy just carrying a big log around and like hooting yeah also i thought it was kind of bullshit that they hide that beehive full of bees in the in the health item tree that pissed me oh yeah the the bees attack i thought the bees were going to attack the enemies no the bees attack you but then you can pick up the empty beehive and throw it but you it's probably not worth it because you've taken so much damage from these bees at this point yeah it's such a mean trick of like the the health tree had only been nice to you up to this point but i guess you know you're in stage five they got to chip away your health however they can thank you and this is also where you're running to nelson who is only helpful he gives you a power-up item the slingshot and that's

also when you get two throwable blinkies uh the blinky ahead he did appear very briefly in uh the no disgrace like no sorry uh homer's odyssey yes yeah so he he was in season one and uh yes this is also where not only do you have a raccoon that you can throw that i think also is like straight out of the call of the simpsons i think it's a no it's a rabbit that gets flung yeah the the raccoons are the ones that fight homer when he tries to like straight out of the Call of the Simpsons. I think it's a rabbit that gets flung. The raccoons are the ones that fight Homer when he tries to flush him out of it. And that's where just Sideshow Bob

is walking around with a turkey in the woods. Sure. Though I think him pulling that cart is a reference to him pulling in the pork products for Krusty. That's what I think it is. No, you're totally right about that. So at that point, I mean, Sideshow Bob was not evil right I mean this game is a helpful

character who gave you turkey right so well no if he's if they were calling on Krusty gets busted then they would have known at the end of the episode that he turns evil so yeah I don't like the people making this game I'm not sure if the Simpsons was available like in Japanese

but I'm sure they saw like oh Krusty with Sideshow Bob or Sideshow Bob alone with no context, thinking this is a fun design for a character. Let's have him be a background guy, not knowing he is a villain in the series. You know, the impression I got from an interview with anime historian Toshio Okada was that, yeah, Japan didn't really get simpsons until like 93 or 94 i think it was uh and then it was pretty funny because okada uh the otak king he put it as like oh this is just for like the america weebs in japan regular japanese people don't get this show that that was his opinion of it uh and yeah then you just straight up fight a bear

but this is where it felt like greening again my guess is that greening said he didn't want the simpsons to have beat up a bear and so it's revealed to be one of the guys in a suit in a very like cheesy way just the sprite shrinks and it's like no it was a guy that's all just a guy i felt better about it afterwards and yes those bears were friendly and called the simpsons and uh that's when maggie almost falls over the waterfall just like in maggie in peril but this time smithers grabs her and everyone else falls to their death and leads to a jacob's ladder kind of uh stage of a shared collective unconsciousness dream i like that and also at this point in the series the simpsons that had two dream sequences that were in black and white so i assume people making the

game are thinking yeah this is the standard format for a simpsons dream sequence in fact the the sequence that bart has the nightmare that bart has in bart the genius about the uh the train and you know martin's there's the evil conductor evil conductor martin is in the background with the santa fe like spray painting on the Santa Fe sign. Very, very briefly. They took it right from that episode. How we use electricity

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about smart meter plans, EV tariffs, solar panels, and much more. Making your usage clearer, your trips greener, your home cozier, and your world brighter. Find our Net Zero Hub at electricireland.ie. Yeah, I like that it's a combo of all of their nightmares. They're like, well, it's like a Homer donut attacks them. Yeah. Yeah, and saxophones attack them.

And then I always wonder, in a Freudian sense, what does the many Marge heads popping up and hitting them, what does that represent in their fears? Her hidden bunny ears. Yes, yeah. Yes, the big secret that she's living with. I also think it's so strange that they you know they have the elementary school in the background here and it made me think like man

they didn't have a fight in the elementary school like what a strange and odd choice i also as a little kid i was haunted by the empty power plant suits like i thought yeah really creepy yeah so this was already a game where they could let their imaginations run a little bit wild but with the dream sequence you know clearly all all bets were off they didn't have to uh stick with even the simpsons uh in world version of reality anymore yeah that's why at the end of this rather short stage actually which had some clever stuff actually i loved the word maggie and an exclamation point drops from the sky. And then you can pick up the letters in the word Maggie

and then throw them as weapons, which were good against the, I think because you fought the donuts right after that or something like that. But there are the suits. But the boss of this level was a, it could have been anything, right? It literally could have been anything in the world.

It's a dream sequence, anything. And it was a bowling ball. It was a bowling ball with eyeballs and a mouth in the three holes. Bowling ball arms. Arms made of bowling. It grew bowling ball arms. And I felt that that boss was like, it was so disappointing and so boring. It's a weird boss, but bowling defined homer in season one like he just talked

about it there was an episode about bowling i mean eventually well he's too drunk and lazy to bowl so it's no longer a characteristic of him and occasionally there would be a bowling episode here and there but that was like all he was about constantly was bowling in the episode life on the fast lane in a way a bowling brawl almost does destroy the entire family. So I can see why they'd all have a nightmare about it. Is this Homer, the bowling ball? You know, it should say Homer on it. I wish it did.

Also, when they fight the devil version of Bart, that's taken from the 1988 Allman Short, The Money Jar. Wow. Oh, yeah. That's the shoulder devil version that tells bart to steal money from the money jar and those are the bart devils that appear whenever you die yes yeah and and that's clever like that's that to me was a that to me was a fun you know dream sequence fight right yeah that the bar bar to come out of that dream sequence and go like is this what you think of me you all think of me is this uh yeah the the bowling ball uh with

its bowling ball arms it lasts a little too long i think it's kind of cheap the way it like drops in at the start of the stage and just hits you too but a preview of uh the burns boss though it has multiple phases yeah to let you know like this is going to be a thing for bosses soon and i do like its anime pendulum tears i do like that any any funny uh crying drawing like that uh and then once you beat it then like it does a really cool like fate to white is uh representing everybody waking up and and then what a clever bonus stage i love that bonus yeah uh i thought this was very funny as i get the slapping yourself bonus stage yeah yeah to recover from a coma uh

but again hated him because my brother always beat me at them no fun but uh but yes when they awaken from almost drowning they're they're conveniently right outside of channel six they see that the helicopter has landed right there and so uh the the reaction shot of everybody looking at channel six is crazy. I love it. I actually sent it to my wife, Nina, the other day, just as Marge shrieking with the weird backwards quarter profile shot where they just have beaks, basically. Yeah, Bart looks like a squawking bird.

Yeah. And so they headed to Channel 6, and, you know, disappointingly there's no Kent Brockman, but the reporter guy is the reporter who said, Bigfoot has been found in Call of the Simpsons. So that's also why there's a Bigfoot standee right by it. It's the same posing on the guy, too. But except for the shrug, the shrug is their version of the animation of it. But I guess, you know, that's when you see burns on the screen there which is their way of

saying like hey if you if you somehow don't know the show and don't know that burns and smithers are an item here's that mr burns guy you'll be seeing him soon the game did a good job of connecting every level but it's not clear why smithers had to land on channel six's helipad to get to the nuclear power plant that's true yeah it doesn't uh yeah uh but but really channel six once you get by that first news reporter there this is just a potpourri of ideas here it did it goes uh and sadly no crusty i guess we already been in crusty land so you're not gonna go to the crusty tv show but but you could this could be an excuse to just go through like an itchy and scratchy stage or whatever but instead oh it's just like a sci-fi robot boss and then japan you made me think uh there's no itchy and

scratchy in this game yeah which is very very weird and it's strange because most of the games would have an itchy and scratchy section in them or then to the point by 93 a full itchy and scratchy video game now i love the japan section because it's uh konami a japanese company being very brazen saying yeah you're just gonna be in a japan stage and the boss is gonna be a very japanese boss and they did this a few times with american ip where they would shove in a very japanese stage i think one of the extra stages they added for the ninja turtles nes arcade game was a very japanese stage and like even in the lone ranger you fight like in a samurai castle for one of the stages for their Lone Ranger NES game.

You know, write what you know. It's like, oh, okay, well. You got a big Mount Fuji in the background there. You fight basically foot clan ninjas. As you walk towards the boss, there's a big kanji scroll, which I asked our friend Maddie what that was. And she says it says kabuki on it well that makes sense because you fight a kabuki boss yes with like a burns kabuki mask almost yeah i thought uh chris do you think that mask or the face that the kabuki guy makes it looks kind of

like the hyoutuko masks the like ooh face guy kind of old-timey masks yeah yeah yeah i i think that's probably what they were going for close to it yeah very much uh like it reminds me so much of like the mystical ninja series the goemon series yep yep it lasts too long though that fight i'm like how long am i fighting this guy like it's i guess also it's the only boss fight where random uh enemies can come in and accompany it too like the ninjas keep showing up while you're fighting it instead of just focused on the boss like every other boss fight but eventually you defeat him you leave this very Japanese drama show and it's a fun transition that just instead of the color the idea is that color bars don't appear on your screen uh and it's

like that it's a stand uh or it's like just a physical background that appears in the background to be like oh color bars we've gone to the test pattern oh no that's actually a kabuki play thing that's the curtain that comes across when the play is over oh yeah okay oh wow you don't know about kabuki place henry i'm more of a fan of no theater bob what theater no we're not doing this but yes this is when smithers conveniently runs by and takes him to the power plant and you know what no matter how many times i play this game every time they arrive at the power plant for stage eight and the characters walk into screen i'm like all right time to fight my way through the power plant too every time i think it's a real stage but but it is not well you kind of walk past the real stage into like smithers office which does look like the mr burns office yeah the the accurate to late in season one burns office

it's not the homer's odyssey burns office yeah but yeah that's where it becomes then the the shredder and krang fight where where you first fight Shredder. Welcome to my world. Yes, yeah. Yep. And I love bomb-throwing Smithers. His cape full of bombs. He's so happy he's showing off his bombs.

He'll even drop some bombs that you can throw at him. I like the Smithers' Nosferatu cape over the face. And also when he throws his cape out and you can see all the bombs hanging in them it's such a cool design uh he's uh and as we all know what what job at the nuclear power plant do you think he applied to uh originally did burns advertise specifically for somebody with a coat full of bombs or could the could the bombs have been do you have to is it was it strictly byob uh you know bring your own bombs or could the could the bombs have been do you have to is it was it strictly byob uh you know bring your own bombs or did the nuclear power plant supply the uh the the the

round fuse bombs that you would need a special assistant to mr burns in this case i could go on he applied under project bootstrap thank you president ford uh you know like well smithers would say eventually you get put into, you know, cartoon supervillainy if you work for Mr. Burns. And this version of Smithers embraced it instead of fighting against it. Yep, yep. I also like you can spot all the monitor.

If you go all the way to the right in the room, you'll see all the monitors Burns uses to watch people. And in a very darkly funny moment burns explode smithers explodes himself yes he does uh his just red face and the way he explodes is is wacky apparently in the japanese version fruit flies out of him for health bonuses that that's the game being a little nicer there's a lot more health bonuses in general uh and this is when yeah burns comes out and says, Welcome to your grave, suckers.

Yes. All right. I got the Burns quotes. Oh, here we go. Yes. Excellent. Where do you think you're going? Welcome to your grave, suckers.

Uh-oh. There you go. So one excellent, and Harry Shearer could sue over that yeah he should he should get he should own konami now harry sure now i mean now that i've really revisited this i think that's just the most iconic mr burns line ever really truly sums them up as a character and uh yeah that's so fun that seems like it was written by the same person who wrote the uh uh welcome to die lines from uh vagnito the next year in the x-men arcade it's a very also very japanese like mecha suit he's in that has a bunch of different forms there's like the walking form

the tank form the hover form it's so cool again these should all be toys too like give me bomb smithers give me a mech suit burns uh you know i also can always remember the intensity of this section because we got to burns and he was really hard and i think my mom was like i'm almost out of tokens do i really like she was kind of wavering like do i gotta buy five more dollars of tokens you guys are so close and and we're just like you know intense children screaming like please more dollars of tokens? You guys are so close. And we're just like, you know, intense children screaming like, please, more tokens. We can't lose. We'll have 20 seconds on the game over screen. Come on, mom, please.

This is like a three or four dollar boss fight, too. It is a very long and very cheap. So bullshit. Yeah. I think even as a little kid, when the hovercraft skirt popped out i was like saying like seriously how how many stages to this arcade games are all about the sunk cost fallacy and getting you to believe in it like i've spent this much money why not spend more uh it trained us it taught us a lot of bad lessons as a child but yes eventually you do explode his suit. He also is dropping the bombs that were items in the Japanese version.

But after a very long fight, his suit explodes. You then, Mr. Burns just stands there and in one hit, you knock him over. That's so much fun. And then in also a very early series kind of joke way, Maggie walks in the screen and a fully animator slowly walking falling down getting back up and walking some more yep and uh that's when you see mr burns dies he is dead too he's a dead x's appear on his eyes it doesn't get more clear than that and uh but he's given the pacifier just like he's given by Maggie and Rosebud.

Damn you, paparazzo. Yes, yeah. And then the ending is just taken directly from the end of No Disgrace Like Home when they get their TV back. Yeah, I really love the purple gradient of just the reunited, excited family all together and the celebration screen. And, yeah, they just took the the walk home though this time they had to rechange homer's arms because in the no disgrace like home ending

homer's holding the tv that they got oh no wait no no i'm sorry i'm thinking of when they walk there okay it's it's all the same puzzle and if you watch it long enough maggie will fall occasionally and get like pulled backwards and have to walk back forwards uh but i will say uh one note that i didn't say in this podcast is that in 2009 there was an ios game called simpsons arcade but guess what buddy it was not simpsons arcade the cruel trick of it was a lot of it was very loosely based on this arcade game but it was an original ea game that looks like crap, had the virtual joystick and buttons, which never work right, and I don't know if it's still listed,

but that was not this. If you look at a playthrough of it, you can see so many ideas were taken from this, but the art is worse, the music is worse. And you're only Homer, I think. You only play as Homer. That was very early in my games press career, and it was one of the first times

I wrote a very pissy little article going like, this isn't the Simpsons arcade game. What the hell? And it clearly just was that EA didn't want to deal with Konami to co-share the rights of releasing the real one at that time. That was my guess. And then for about a two-year period they did agree to to share the wealth on it february 2012 to december 2013 was the only time you could buy this on xbox live or psm yep so we're getting close we're getting close to seven years of it being gone again it's just so silly to me that it can't especially it's like what what's konami gonna do like just just get a little bit of money off of it who care like you have have a good little paycheck from

selling this game with ea i mean konami is is weird they for as much as people complain about them they have been kind of good stewards of their uh game catalog they have put out retro re-releases of some things but i found it weird that uh there as of this recording there is a newish season of castlevania that is i i was surprised based on one of the PS2 games, and I was like, well, where's this collection? Shouldn't people be playing the source material if this very popular animated series is based on this PS2 game

that frankly no one really played? That should be available, but they're very picky about what they actually will put out. Yeah, I mean, hey, look, we could fill a whole podcast with trying to guess what the business of Konami is. Like, it doesn't, they actually will put out yeah who's i mean hey look we've uh we can fill a whole podcast with trying to guess what the business of konami is like it doesn't uh we're just outsiders guessing

there but i i i guess the last thing i'll say the game itself is i love that homer just tosses the diamond he's like we don't need this just throws it away they don't want to be rich they want to be america's regular family have love well they, again, at this point, you know, Evil Smithers has died by suicide. They murdered Mr. Burns. They punched him until he literally died. So, I mean, you know, what more do the Simpsons need? You know, their basic needs have been met.

So they don't need that diamond anymore, for sure. Did he die? What am I, a doctor? And then we get the high score entry screen if you didn't if you didn't die the rest of the way here here's when you get the high score screen and that's where they have the bart man just the bart man art they just drew it they redrew it right there and it's another place where they get to the one other place where they can reuse the maggie sprite walking as she just walks across the bottom of the screen in a in a very cute way but yeah it's uh you know it was nice for those you know 18 sweet noggy months that we got to have the uh the simpsons arcade game available on you

know xbox live and psn and then then the government took it away from us again. Damn them. Who knows? By the time you're hearing this, maybe there was a leaked thing that looked like the arcade one-up company was getting to release it. They did. They've released other Konami arcade ones before. They did the TMNT 89. And I know in the fandom of those, the number one requested game has been the Simpsons game. So maybe they made it happen it's just you gotta you gotta negotiate ea i believe still has the simpsons game rights which mainly is just to have the uh endless money machine of tapped out exist now like in its 10th

year of operation yeah bob it makes too much money you can't complain like who are you it's a worthington's law bob i was one of the first to complain when i was in the games press like this isn't a game uh you've been we've been complaining for a decade about it but uh but yeah i guess uh any any final thoughts about simpsons arcade i i uh it's still warmly fun and nostalgic for me to play it's a thing i think i'll probably play it every five years till i'm dead just to remember to remember youth and then just happier times of childhood oh to me this is the the peak of this genre this and turtles in time the same year this is just the peak of the brawler it could get no better than this uh this is just where it peaked for me and i think for the entire industry

and uh yeah uh it's not just because it's The Simpsons. It's a very well-made game of this sort. It's like the best this could possibly be in my estimation. So I have fuzzy memories of it. I still like playing it today. And it's still fun to see the anime meets Macaroning style of this game, which will never happen again. And again, I mean, at this point, you know,

this was kind of the end of the walk to the right and punch everything brawlers um dominance over the arcade scene because street fighter 2 was about to roll into town and uh and that was pretty much it and even if you look at you know even if you look at ninja turtles um after uh turtles in time uh the the home versions of that what did the konami circles games uh they they did uh teenage mutant turtles tournament fighters they turned that into a one-on-one brawler as well but didn't have an arcade version but yes I mean as a person who really I mean again yes played a lot of Double Dragon played the heck out of Final Fight played a lot of this you know really appreciating that genre this this really yeah this this this was

the peak and and it showed the strengths and the limitations you know of that particular genre of game but yeah just to have that. And especially when home consoles were not quite there in terms of being able to include so much full screen animation, so many voice clips, you know, to have something in the arcades that just from a technological perspective, you could not have in your house was a it was it was a fun time. So Chris, thanks again for being on the show. Please plug whatever you wish to plug things like Good Job Brain. We know it's finally back from hiatus.

We're very excited about that. Yes. Check out my trivia podcast that I do with my, you know, pub trivia team. We haven't played pub trivia together in a really long time, but we used to and we were really good at it. And but we do Good Job Brain. It is it is all kinds of weird facts and quizzes and stuff like that. It's just fun, funny, I hope.

And we just did an episode of a podcast called Escape This Podcast in which we all did an escape room together, all the Good Job Brain crew. Did an audio escape room, which was super fun. My day job right now is at Digital Eclipse. We actually are doing collections of classic video games. Just put out Blizzard Arcade Collection a few months back. That was a lot of fun to work on.

The original Blizzard games like Lost Vikings and Rock and Roll Racing. Just working on other stuff and hopefully stuff you guys are going to like. I like stuff I like. Yes.

It's my favorite kind of stuff. Yeah. No, you do great work there, Chris. We thank you for all the cool that you are very committed to video game history and you're making it work with the publishers at your job. We really appreciate it. Yay. I do my best.

So thanks again to Chris Kohler for being on the show. Please check out Good Job Brain, his trivia podcast.ler for being on the show please check out good job brain his trivia podcast ask for us if you want to check out more of what we do and get all these episodes one week ahead of time in ad free please go to patreon.com slash talking simpsons sign up for five bucks a month to get just that but also access to everything behind the five dollar pay wall that includes all of our limited miniseries the most recent one that we did was talking to the hill season two part one that is our king of the hill retrospective miniseries i'll have new episodes of that and who knows by the time this episode goes live we might have already

announced our miniseries for the fall of 2021 only available to patrons that are on the five dollar level or above so keep your eye out for that and also we have a ten dollar level at patreon.com slash talking simpsons when you sign up for that get access to all the $5 stuff plus one mega long podcast once a month only for patrons of that level or higher that's right Bob you're talking about the what a cartoon movie podcast

now you listeners maybe know me and Bob have a sister podcast we do twice a month called what a cartoon where we cover an animated series as super in depth as we do an episode of the Simpsons and each month we do a feature film version of that where we cover an animated feature film often for over four hours films as diverse as the hunchback of notre dame and hercules in our summer of disney renaissance before that we had a lot of fun with the film cool world and we have a giant back catalog almost three years worth of them from films as diverse as akira to a goofy movie over

140 hours of podcasts are there at your fingertips extra on top of all the five dollar stuff if you are a ten dollar and up subscriber at patreon.com slash talking simpson as for me i've been one of your hosts bob mackie you can find me on twitter as bob servo my other podcast is retronauts it's a classic gaming podcast about old video games you can find that wherever you find podcasts or go to patreon.com slash retronauts sign up there for two full-length bonus episodes every month henry what about you you can follow me henry gilbert on twitter at h-e-n-e-r-e-y-g please follow me there also if you're following me and bob on twitter please follow the official twitter account of this podcast at talk simpsons pod at talk simpsons

pod we'll keep you up to date on all of the new events in our world on every podcast when there's new stuff on the patreon any stuff going on please follow at talk simpsons pod on twitter to stay up to date thanks so much for joining us folks we'll see you next time for season 12 new kids on the black we'll see you then Welcome to your grave, suckers.