Development
The game's developer, Radical Entertainment, received the rights to create games for The Simpsons franchise when they demonstrated a playable prototype. Radical released its first The Simpsons game in 2001 called The Simpsons Road Rage, a parody of the Crazy Taxi series of video games. After Road Rage was released, the development team for Hit & Run decided not to create a direct sequel to Road Rage. Instead, Radical wanted to steer the franchise's video game series in a different direction by giving the game engine a complete overhaul. The developers felt that everything else needed a new approach, while only the driving portion of Road Rage was worth keeping; in Hit & Run, enhanced traffic artificial intelligence is introduced, which makes computer-controlled vehicles react better to the player's driving. The developers also decided to add an exploration element to the game to make players get out of the car and navigate the area on foot, so that the game offered a better experience of Springfield.
When developing the game's graphics, the team decided to include landmarks from Springfield. The player is able to enter some of them, including the Kwik-E-Mart, Moe's Tavern, Springfield Elementary School, and The Android's Dungeon and Baseball Card Shop. During Hit & Run's development, 20th Century Fox, Gracie Films, and Matt Groening, the creator of The Simpsons, played important roles in bringing the Simpsons universe into a 3D environment. All character voices were supplied by the actual cast, and the series' writers wrote the entire story for the game, including dialogue. Tim Ramage, the associate producer of the game's publisher, Vivendi Universal Games, considered it a blessing to have the opportunity of working with the Simpsons cast, along with the writers, who Ramage called "the best there is ".
Read more about this topic: The Simpsons: Hit & Run
Famous quotes containing the word development:
“Sleep hath its own world,
And a wide realm of wild reality.
And dreams in their development have breath,
And tears, and tortures, and the touch of joy.”
—George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)
“The man, or the boy, in his development is psychologically deterred from incorporating serving characteristics by an easily observable fact: there are already people around who are clearly meant to serve and they are girls and women. To perform the activities these people are doing is to risk being, and being thought of, and thinking of oneself, as a woman. This has been made a terrifying prospect and has been made to constitute a major threat to masculine identity.”
—Jean Baker Miller (20th century)
“Such condition of suspended judgment indeed, in its more genial development and under felicitous culture, is but the expectation, the receptivity, of the faithful scholar, determined not to foreclose what is still a question—the “philosophic temper,” in short, for which a survival of query will be still the salt of truth, even in the most absolutely ascertained knowledge.”
—Walter Pater (1839–1894)