Smithers, why do they hate me so? – The Simpsons Wrestling

In October 1995, soon after the PlayStation came here, and right in the midst of gaming’s shift towards 3D, an episode of The Simpsons called “Treehouse of Horror VI” aired. The last of its three discrete sections, “Homer³”, is partly rendered in computer animation. In it, Homer Simpson stumbles into The Third Dimension, a mystifying world only explicable by those with advanced degrees in hyperbolic topology.

Now, there is scant previous indication within the world of The Simpsons that they live in a world diagetically defined in two dimensions – pretty much just the occasional bit of cartoon logic. But there is plenty of indication to the contrary, that these are people living lives generally like ours, in a world like ours. Right from the zoom-in through the school window to Bart writing his lines, it couldn’t work in a 2D world. The conceit of “Homer³“ is a nonsense. That’s fine for a gag segment in an episode whose whole point is to do things that wouldn’t normally make sense, but it makes the reality even clearer: the world depicted in The Simpsons is a 3D world, rendered in animation based on 2D drawings. There is no horror to the residents of Springfield in three dimensions. Or at least there wasn’t until The Simpsons Wrestling came along six years later.

Released during a less urgent but even more expansive phase of The Simpsons licensing than the one which provided a UK #1 single a full decade earlier, The Simpsons Wrestling is, unsurprisingly, a wrestling game featuring locations and characters from The Simpsons. Unlike past Simpsons games but like, say, WWF Smackdown!, its characters are free to move around in three dimensions with changing camera angles. And one of the first striking things about The Simpsons Wrestling is that it looks terrible.

Everyone is recognisable and looks loosely like they should, but they look flattened and twisted, outlines missing or jaggedly broken at random, even before the loosest of interactions leaves them merging into each other in a yellow mess. It doesn’t seem like that was the universal verdict at the time — David Gibbon at the BBC thought it looked really nice! — but Doug Perry’s IGN review referring to “eye-piercingly-horrific animation” was more typical. The ghastly effect goes beyond hardware limitations, but it is fair to say that it was a tall order for the PlayStation, and would be a lot more manageable on its successor, when better-loved Simpsons games would indeed emerge.

Big Ape Productions (who we encountered before via the even more thankless task of making the game of The Phantom Menace) clearly struggled with making it look right. Their graphical goal was a complicated matter. They were, after all, trying to use 3D models to approximate the 2D look of The Simpsons’s (3D) world, and bring it to your (2D) TV. And maybe it’s because all of those dimensions to collapse just in showing the player anything, but the gameplay is thoroughly one-dimensional.

Beyond a couple of different energy bars and having to pin your opponent for victory — for which you pretty much have to have drained their whole main energy bar — there is none of the complexity of WWF Smackdown!, already itself a simpler take than others. Apart from those pins and fights taking place in enormous square rings (surrounded by cardboard cut-outs of familiar characters), there is little that is wrestling to the fighting at all. There are pre-packaged taunts and victory speeches that lend a little to the sense of show, but although ably voiced by the TV cast they’re too rote and restrained to hang much on. They’re dressing at most for a very basic fighting game. 

Each character gets a few different moves, including their own unique special moves, like Bart riding around on his skateboard or Ned Flanders calling on God to smite his opponent with lightning bolts. Apu gets some kind of kung-fu frenzy, because… he’s Asian? Fighting him and hearing identical recordings of Hank Azaria saying “ow” and “oh my” in his exaggerated accent every time you land a hit certainly dials up the inescapability of the racism.

Mostly the special moves and power-ups don’t matter much, because mashing square for a basic attack, or jumping on the opponent’s head again and again, is more than sufficient. As Lisa Simpson I won battle after battle that way, before hitting an absurd difficulty spike with Smithers & Mr. Burns, whose combination of a knockdown-causing nuclear fish flopping about and nuclear bombs chucked from the sidelines is vastly overpowered. The battle is introduced as being with Smithers, but the victory screen says Mr. Burns, which seems like a mostly squandered joke about him taking the credit for his lackey’s work. There are bits like that spread throughout the game, like the designers were vaguely aware of a joke but didn’t treat it as their priority.

The wikipedia page for The Simpsons Wrestling has a citation-free claim that it’s considered to be one of the worst video games of all time. I haven’t come across one of those since Rise of the Robots, also a one-on-one fighting game with extremely limited gameplay. I can certainly see why The Simpsons Wrestling didn’t get a reputation as being good, because it isn’t. Worst. Game. Ever. is a harsh verdict, though. Its most notable flaw, beyond those imported from the show, is a total lack of polish. For all of its limited range, it’s many times more fun to play than Rise of the Robots was, and I imagine would be even more so if I had another human player to play against, or had the affection for The Simpsons that many people still had in 2001. 

More than anything, it feels like a throwback to another age of games, one that was already past its peak when The Simpsons first made it to TV. A simpler time of limited brawling where a frenzy of button-mashing and a couple of simple gimmicks was more than enough for a fun time. It even dispenses with almost any narrative in-game in favour of putting it all in an entertaining section in the manual, like a true product of the ‘80s. Downgrade the graphics and simplify it still further and it could sit right alongside Pro Boxing Simulator on the Commodore 64. The nightmare comes from the third dimension.

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Top of the charts for week ending 31 March 2001:

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