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Every generation gets its own Simpsons game. That’s the rules-nonsense. For others, it was the household cabinets that swallowed the pocket money in the 1990s. For others, it was The Simpsons: Cartoon Studio. For millennials like me, it was The Simpsons: Hit & Run. Joe Zanetti, vice president of operations at Monopoly Go! developer Scopely, traces his passion for The Simpsons game back to Konami’s 1991 brawler, The Simpsons Arcade games. He said: “He was the one who impressed me the most.”
It sure did, because Springfield just fell to Monopoly Go! exclusively through a collaboration involving The Simpsons writers, animators and voice talent along with new musical shorts by Dan Castellaneta, Nancy Cartwright, Harry Shearer and Will Ferrell. While many licensed TV shows have lost their popularity, The Simpsons lives on finding new digital lives.
“It was a little episode of The Simpsons,” says Loni Steele Sosthand, a co-creator who is in her sixth season writing for The Simpsons. He speaks to us from the Fox lot in Los Angeles, where he is working on the show’s 2027 Treehouse of Horror episodes – to give an idea of the length of the works.
The Simpsons He has been feeling very fit for the game. Unlike many sitcoms, Springfield is not just a place, but an entire populated world with hundreds of people, famous places and years of comics waiting to be explored, from the Stonecutters to Mr Sparkle.
This flexibility has allowed the franchise to move seamlessly between genres, from arcade beat-’em-ups to open-world games. Monopoly Go! it’s just the latest stop in the monorail game.
Sosthand thinks the reason is simple. He said: “In his heart, it is a matter of family.”
It’s also a show that’s thrived on crime, giving creators permission to go wild. “It’s not: ‘This is our box,'” Zanetti said. “More: ‘How can we break the box?’
The biggest surprise in the new Monopoly Go! collaboration — a two-month takeover in Springfield featuring original stories, movie shorts, themed mini-games and more Simpsons — is the standard behind-the-scenes action. Instead of licensing characters and applying yellow paint, Scopely worked directly with The Simpsons writers, artists and animators for months. It was less about borrowing the Simpsons characters and more about borrowing the Simpsons writers.
Zanetti said: “We weren’t just paying our respects.
The group liked the information. People like Rich Texan and Homer Plopper the pig entered the game along with familiar faces. One of Sosthand’s favorite works is Cowboy Carl, the Writers Guild award-winning Carl Carlson Rides Again, which explored the legacy of the Black cowboy.
“We were trying to come up with a joke for every mechanic,” says Zanetti. “He felt that he was a very good writer.”
Veteran actor Eric Keyes, who has been working on the show since its inception, served as an unofficial character director. “They just look at something and see if there isn’t the right number of eyelashes,” says Sosthand.
Decades ago, the Simpsons video game usually meant a television series adapted for social media. Today, this partnership is moving in two directions. Sosthand said: “I’m impressed with the wealth of the world we’re creating. I have a lot of respect for sports.”
Sports games like Monopoly Go! it is a place where people spend years not hours. For a franchise as established as The Simpsons, they can offer something television is struggling to provide: a world that’s constantly expanding.
In almost four decades, the series has survived every change in entertainment: television, DVDs, advertising, television. Most franchises end up being bogged down by ambition; The Simpsons seem to be dumping in the Springfield nuclear plant and turning it into new fuel.
Maybe that’s why the competition between Mr Burns and Mr Monopoly in this game is so amazing. As Zanetti says, they all become “very important places in the zeitgeist”.
Thirty years after Homer walked into Moe’s Tavern, Springfield remains a cultural icon. And if the journey from arcade cabinets to Monopoly Go! it proves everything, and that’s that The Simpsons’ biggest fraud never existed predicting the future. It was finding new ways to live.
