RetroGaming

I wonder how Konami decided which of their licensed beat-'em-ups did or didn't get console ports. In order of release, they go ...

• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1989 arcade, 1990 NES)
• The Simpsons (1991 arcade)
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Turtles in Time (1991 arcade, 1992 SNES)
• X-Men (1992 arcade)
• Asterix (1992 arcade)

Maybe the answer is just "TMNT was a juggernaut"? The Simpsons was extremely early in its run (mid-season 2) when the game launched. The X-Men cartoon hadn't even started yet. Asterix is just aggressively European. The games probably all did well, but I wouldn't be surprised if the TMNT titles eclipsed them in earnings.

I don't think it's a hardware capability thing, or we wouldn't have console versions of the TMNT games, either. While the SNES hardware is obviously less capable than the original arcade cab, many consider the SNES port of Turtles in Time to be definitive. There's no reason Simpsons couldn't have been similar.

The story just broke on corporate news networks, I heard the president of video games is going to make an address

I know this is not a popular take, but in my opinion The Simpsons Arcade wasn't a very good game. I believe it's purely a novelty product, it falls short when compared to almost any other well known beat'em up from the era.

I wonder if it was a rights issue. Konami made the arcade game while all of the Simpsons games on the NES/SNES/Genesis/Game Boy/Game Gear were published by Acclaim.

Fantastic game. Spent many afternoons playing it.

I think either PS1/Saturn/N64 or PS2/Dreamcast/Gamecube would be the first time I'd trust a console to run the game authentically.

An NES version would be so stripped down it would feel disappointing.

Fuck them... I'd have loved this game back when I had my Mega Drive...

Who wants to feel old?

Even crazier, the C64 version was only distributed in North America, ignoring the majority of potential buyers. And it apparently runs OK on PAL machines without modification.

One of the big draws of the game was all the detail in the backgrounds, and the little touches of animation. The C64 version being disk-only allows it to retain a surprising amount of this. As a tape game, the already long inter-level load times would've blown out and ruined the game.

I don't think that an NES or Master System port could've covered the game even as well as the C64 version. But I agree that it is strange that there was no Mega Drive or SNES version. The SNES in particular could've replicated a lot of the arcade's scaling effects with a minimum of trickery.

I remember reading in a gaming magazine that Konami was bringing the Simpsons to the SNES. I just knew it was going to be the arcade game, and I was so hyped for months just waiting and waiting for it. And then I got Barts Nightmare.