The Very First ‘Simpsons’ Video Game Was Completely Batshit Insane

Simpsons fans are currently mourning the imminent loss of the popular mobile game The Simpsons: Tapped Out, following the news that EA will wipe everyone’s pocket-sized Springfields from existence early next year. In retrospect, Tapped Out may have been the most consistently popular of all Simpsons games, engaging fans for over a decade, and raking in over $100 million thanks to its controversial “freemium” format, but it was hardly the first video game to feature America’s favorite cartoon family. 

Back in 1991, just two years after the series premiered, the Simpsons made the leap to the world of gaming, in the form of a beat-‘em-up arcade game simply called The Simpsons. It was way more fun than Lee Carvallo's Putting Challenge.

Predating the North American release of the Nintendo game Bart vs the Space Mutants by “a month” (although some sources claim that Space Mutants actually came out slightly earlier), The Simpsons arcade game was colorful and amusing, allowing up to four players to team up as different members of the Simpson family.

It was also completely bonkers. While games like Tapped Out obviously had decades of Simpsons lore to draw upon, the arcade game was released in the middle of the second season, meaning that the company behind the game, Konami, only had a handful of episodes to turn to for inspiration, which is why the game found the Simpsons battling a truly odd assortment of enemies ranging from barflies, to zombies, to mutant bowling pin monsters.

But the weirdest part of the game, in retrospect, was the storyline. The inciting incident of the game comes when Smithers breaks into a jewelry store and steals a large diamond. However, he bumps into the Simpsons on the way out, and the diamond lands in Maggie’s mouth, taking the place of her beloved pacifier. So Smithers kidnaps Maggie and runs away, forcing Homer and his family to fight their way through an army of goons to retrieve her.

Okay, first of all, breaking and entering and child abduction seem a little out of character for Smithers, who is also wearing a cape for some reason. But things get really dark at the end of the game when the Simpsons break into the nuclear plant. Smithers tries to blow up the family with an assortment of literal bombs — again, shocking move for a guy who’s off-hours are spent collecting Malibu Stacy dolls — before Mr. Burns shows up in some kind of a mech suit. You only win the game by breaking apart the suit, then brutally beating the old man to death. 

And he’s very much dead. There are X’s on his eyes and everything. Then Maggie swipes the diamond, and shoves her pacifier into the corpse’s mouth before the family cheerfully strolls home.

Actually, upon closer inspection, the X’s only show up on Burns’ eyes after Maggie inserts the pacifier. Which would mean that Maggie killed Mr. Burns — something she would attempt again years later.

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