The Column of All Cosmos

Fake Simpsons Video Games, Ranked

Buy me Bonestorm or go to hell!

4 min readMar 16, 2017

Not Bloodstorm, or Bonesquad, or Bloodstorm 2.

In an effort to get my work published on Deadspin and/or Kotaku, which quite frankly is not going super well, I am going to now rank all of the fake video games that appear on The Simpsons. As a ’90s child who has been raised on all things Simpsons (shirts, pajama bottoms, bed sheets, lunch boxes, I could go on and on), the entire show has been ingrained in me. And when I first starting playing games in the early ’90s, The Simpsons games were obviously go-to choices. When watching the show, some of my favorite jokes and gags were about the fictional games the writers made up, because they could see how big the merchandising empire had become.

My criteria for these is somewhat arbitrary: essentially it’s how funny the joke is, how cool the game looks, whether or not I would want to play it, and how iconic the game is to the episode/show. If there is some gameplay, that really helps the ranking out considerably, but it isn’t 100% necessary. You can kind of tell what type of game each is, the genre or what it’s spoofing.

There are a ton of names on arcade machines throughout the show’s history, and a ton of fake games in their E3 parody episode, but those don’t really count because that would be downright impossible to cover all of them.

Shout-outs to some noteworthy runners-up that I couldn’t quite put on this list but really want to: the Itchy & Scratchy handheld game Bart plays while getting a haircut, Bar Brawl 4, Guts of War II, Astro Blast, Pack Rat and Pack Rat Returns, the Devil’s Advocate arcade machine Homer plays, the Pachinko machine Bart plays when he buys it with the credit card he found, and that one unnamed game Grandpa Abe played once in “Lisa’s Pony”.