Not only did I have my bosses at Fox Interactive, but on The Simpsons side there was Gracie Films and Matt Groening - and they often don’t agree on things. John Melchior, producer of The Simpsons: Road Rage: Road Rage was one of the most turbulent experiences of my career and it gave me more grey hairs than just about any game I've ever done. So, I got the ball rolling on Road Rage, but the person who really made it happen was John Melchior. Gradually, the industry began to realize this and, generally, they began to do justice to the brands they licensed. If a game sucked, you didn’t have to wait a month to find out from a magazine, you knew within days. There was a time where this was more or less true, but that started to change when the internet became a bigger part of our lives. They thought if you had a big label, you could put sh*t in a box and it would still sell. Up until that point, the problem with Simpsons games was that sometimes people think the brand will carry the day. Instead, I told him, “You’re sitting on one of the biggest franchises in the world, The Simpsons,” and he looked at me and said, “Michael, Simpsons games don’t sell.” So I told him, “If you made some good ones, they would!” I semi-jokingly told him that you had to get out of the sports business because you couldn't compete with EA Sports, the company that I had just left. Michael Pole, former Senior Vice President of Product Development for Fox Interactive: When I started with Fox Interactive in 2000, I was talking with the president, Steve Bersch, and he asked me what I thought we should be doing as a company. Here, Input talks to the developers who made The Simpsons: Road Rage, and they share the stories of how the game started, the enormous headache it was to develop, and even the lawsuit the game brought about. Two years later, the game would be eclipsed by the far better The Simpsons: Hit & Run - which realized Springfield as a Grand Theft Auto-type sandbox game - but for a good two years Road Rage was the best Simpsons game since the Konami classic and without it, we never would have gotten Hit & Run - which, to this day, is widely considered the best Simpsons game of all time. Which is why, in short order, The Simpsons: Road Rage became a bestseller for the PlayStation 2. It was fun to play, it was written by official Simpsons writers, it featured the voices from the show and it was the first game to successfully realize the characters in 3D. Sure, Road Rage was just a rip-off of Crazy Taxi - the fans knew it, the developers knew it, and the creators of Crazy Taxi most definitely knew it - but Road Rage was still a huge success. But then, in November of 2001, came The Simpsons: Road Rage and, for a brief moment in time, games based on your favorite Springfield family enjoyed a beautiful renaissance.
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A month later was the notoriously abysmal The Simpsons Wrestling, a game so bad that Matt Groening demanded his name be taken off the cover. In April came the forgettable Night of the Living Treehouse of Horror for Game Boy Color. While The Simpsons was in its golden age during the ‘90s, games based on the property were stinkers year after year and, at first, 2001 looked to deliver much of the same. Even if you have some misplaced nostalgia for something like Bartman Meets Radioactive Man, in your heart, you know it’s a bad game. Sadly, after that, things took an immediate downturn and for the next decade Simpsons games were terrible. The early exception, of course, is the 1991 Konami arcade game which wisely mirrored the playability of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles games. the Space Mutants or The Simpsons Wrestling you know that - almost as a rule - games based on The Simpsons suck.