Trivia / The Simpsons Hit & Run

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• Approval of God:
  • In an episode of Boundary Break focusing on the game, Cary Brisebois, one of the game's programmers and a guest star on the episode in question, gave praise to Donut Team for breathing new life into a 15-year-old game.
  • Simpsons writer and current co-showrunner Matt Selman has gone on record as saying he wants a remaster/remake and supports the fandom's efforts in trying to make it happen.
  • A fan-made remaster using hand-drawn animation earned the praise of Joe Mcginn, the game's original designer.
• Cut Song: There is quite a bit of unused music and audio cues in the game files. Of note is that some of it imply that the Power Plant interior and the rich area of Springfield (in particular the Stonecutters' Secret Tunnel and even the Stonecutter Lodge neighbouring Burns' Mansion) was to be accessible on Level 7. A 'failure' version of the "There's Something About Monty" music also exists, even though you cannot fail the part where it plays as it lacks a time limit.
• Dummied Out:
  • Agnes Skinner has a working and fully textured game model hidden in the files, complete with dialogue for getting kicked or run over by a vehicle. It was likely that Radical originally intended for her to accompany her son when he is set as the driver of his own Sedan, though she was replaced with a static, low-poly model.
  • Several vehicles exist in the game's files that are neither accessible from the phone booth nor hidden throughout the levels as secret vehicles. The only way to drive them without hacking the game is to achieve 100% completion, which allows the player to input the Bonus Cars cheat code and subsequently call up any and all vehicles from phone booths, including these unusable vehicles. The vehicles consist of:
    • An Ice Cream Truck. It's uncertain whether this was going to serve a purpose in the game as either a mission-specific vehicle (most likely in the tutorial level, where retrieving ice cream is one of the required goals), a generic traffic vehicle or if it's just an Easter Egg. It's worth noting that the truck has a Marge-shaped ice cream cone atop it, a reference to the episode "Homer Alone".
    • A Brick Car, a car shaped like a red LEGO brick with multicoloured plastic cogs for wheels. This vehicle was previously featured in The Simpsons: Road Rage, where it was a test vehicle that sported a more visually simpler design.
    • Three additional variants of the cell phone car exist. All four Cell Phone Car variants are statistically identical, with their only unique attribute being their colouration; A is blue-grey, B is beige, C is lavender and D is cyan. All four variants were likely intended for the mission "Cell-Outs" (as the mission is structured so that the cell phone cars each spawn one after another to accommodate the unique variants), though only variant A was fully implemented into the mission.
    • A Cube Van, a retextured Duff Truck with a spring-green cabin and a grey trailer, the latter having been lightly vandalized with graffiti (one of which even depicts a Rigellian).
    • Two road vehicles that were originally intended to be featured in Level 1 before being replaced by other vehicles; "Sedan A" (replaced by the Mini School Bus) and "Station Wagon" (replaced by the Glass Truck).
  • The game files also feature an Audi TT (8N) (specifically the 1.8 T Quattro model) which cannot be accessed even with the Bonus Cars cheat enabled. It is a downsized version of the real-world vehicle of the same name/model and is in an unfinished state even when enabled in-game. It is unknown whether the Audi TT was a placeholder vehicle or a leftover from a point in the game's development where real-world licensed cars were planned for inclusion.
  • All five playable characters have quotes that play upon destroying power couplings, even though the couplings themselves only feature once in Level 1's fourth mission, where Homer is the playable character. Judging from the context of the quotes themselves (Marge making bee puns, everyone talking about surveillance), it's likely they were intended to play upon destroying wasp cameras but were changed later in development for unknown reasons.
• Executive Meddling: Menu art was removed and replaced because, under the licensing contract, anybody making 2D art for the Simpsons franchise has to go through Fox's own artists and auditors. Suffice it to say, Radical Entertainment's artists were not happy about this when they found out this information.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: Along with being Screwed by the Lawyers, the main reason why the game hasn't been re-released despite fan demand is due to legal issues between Xbox Game Studios (who owns the catalogues of Radical Entertainment and Vivendi Universal Games) and Electronic Arts (who currently owns the rights to make all Simpsons games under license from Disney), so the only way to play the game is either owning an original copy of the game from the second-hand market or getting the game from ROM sites (or in the case of the PC version, abandonware or torrent sites). Fans got a surprise in January 2023 when the game's full soundtrack was released on streaming services, showing that the game's content isn't fully inaccessible.
• New Work, Recycled Graphics: The game reuses some voice assets from the console versions of The Simpsons: Road Rage, for example Homer's line "Out of my way, jerkass!" or Bart's line "Time for some road rage, Bart Simpson-style."
• Orphaned Reference:
  • During the final mission of Level 3, Lisa states that she'll need to get Bart a diaper before going home, something that's reflected in the loading screen newspaper of the next level. An early version of the mission actually did feature Lisa obtaining a diaper.
  • The Buzz Cola billboard in Level 5 having the caption "For Humans!" makes more sense when exploring the files of the game, revealing that Buzz Cola was originally titled Human Cola.
  • In Level 1's "Petty Theft Homer," Ned Flanders says that he called the police to find his missing belongings, and Homer mentions having to return them before the cops catch him talking to himself. Both of these lines refer to a dropped lose-the-tail segment where Homer would have to avoid the cops before going back to Flanders, which can be found in certain pre-release builds of the game but is absent from the mission in the final product.
• Screwed by the Lawyers: According to Simpsons writer Matt Selman, he fully supports the game being re-released, but notes that "It's a complicated corporate octopus to try to make that happen". This is due to legal issues between Xbox Game Studios (who owns the game's developer Radical Entertainment and original publisher Vivendi Universal Games) and current Simpsons video game licensees Electronic Arts. Basically, unless Microsoft were to acquire EA, or they agree to work together and get the go-ahead from Simpsons owner Disney, or if Disney revokes EA’s exclusive rights to The Simpsons and allows any developer to use the IP as they did with Star Wars, don't count on a remaster or re-release happening anytime soon.
• Troubled Production: The leak of the game's source code in 2021 reveals that the game suffered from delayed development and tension between the developers and Fox, resulting in the final game being completely different to what was originally envisioned.
  • The game was originally planned as a sequel to The Simpsons: Road Rage. After seeing the success of Grand Theft Auto III, Radical repurposed it to be a Wide-Open Sandbox with on-foot elements rather than everything in vehicles. Radical first sent Fox a ludicrously optimistic schedule (16 months from concept to completion for an open-world game, with no assets to base it on), likely in an attempt to get the license. Radical was already behind schedule before the first playable prototype but didn't inform Fox.
  • Due to the delayed schedule, the game failed to meet several deadlines, resulting in months of crunch time and a tense work environment. One visible aspect of things lagging behind is how there are fade-to-black wipes whenever characters get into or out of traffic vehicles, indicating there was no time to create the animations. Poor communication and dysfunction between teams resulted in the game being unstable to the point of being unplayable for weeks at a time. Radical and Fox had conflict over the game's content and design for the duration of the development period.
  • Delays resulted in hasty design changes being made in October 2002 (a food and turbo meter were cut, Levels 2 and 3 were cut by a third of their previous size, two planned boss fights were cut, and bonus missions and collector cards were added) and additional time was needed to polish the game. These design changes continued to be made almost until the game was done.
  • Vivendi didn't want to spend much on the Nintendo GameCube version given that console's reduced install base, and thus they gave the job to just one person, lead programmer Cary Brisebois. Amazingly, he managed to convert all of the game's code in the few weeks he was given to port the game.
• What Could Have Been:
  • A lot of preview pictures of the game's seventh and final level suggest that you were able to go to the 969 area (AKA the more upper-class side, which is blocked off in the game) of Evergreen Terrace at some point. In fact, if the player goes out of bounds in the level and finds where the Stonecutters' Secret Tunnel is supposed to be located, a very eerie Muzak tune plays. There are also remnants of the buildings in the 969 area as well as a few solid areas where the roads are in the first and fourth levels, which may confirm that the area went unused sometime in gameplay. A former Radical employee, Noviwak, confirmed on the Donut Team forum that the entire area was cut to make it easier for artists working on the level.
  • In the game itself, if 100% completion of the game has been reached, typing in a cheat code allows access to any car in the game, including ones that you are not supposed to drive and cars from different areas, from the phone booth. Some of the cars are also cars that don't go used at all, such as an ice cream truck, an ice-box van, three variants of the Cell Phone Users' Car, and even a few generic traffic vehicles.
  • According to some PR asset discs, the Truckasaurus in Level 2 and the Dinosaur Skeleton in Level 5 were intended to be full-on boss fights instead of being defeated in the cutscenes they're introduced in.
  • A sequel was planned and in the very early stages of development when it was cancelled due to EA acquiring the Simpsons licence. A new addition would have been the ability to attach trailers to the cars that could be pulled behind you while driving.

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