Twenty years after the Simpsons were originally introduced as a series of shorts on The Tracy Ullman Show, the animated family has finally made its way to the big screen. While the film has achieved some critical success, we’re more interested in the inevitable video game tie-in that is to follow it in Autumn.

Over the past two decades we’ve seen a plethora of games based on The Simpsons; these have slowly changed as the series has developed. While The Simpsons first centred largely around Bart, it has gradually come to feature other family members as prominently. For the most part, the games based on the series mirror this development; while earlier games allowed the player to step into Bart’s shoes, more recent offerings have come to include more characters.

What’s far more interesting from the point of view of looking forward towards EA’s upcoming Simspons game is that the majority of games so far can be seen as following one of two trends. The first are games that closely mirror the series itself, offering little in the way of gameplay and for the most part these are the worse of the two. Perhaps the best example of this is Virtual Springfield, a barely interactive recreation of the town itself.

By contrast those games based on the license that have been well regarded are those that revel in their video game heritage; games that, were the Simpsons characters and locations revoked, would still have been playable, if not entertaining experiences. Examples of this trend span the console generations, from Bart ’s Nightmare (released in 1993) to the more recent The Simpsons Road Rage and The Simpsons: Hit & Run. What these games have in common is that they are games first and foremost, and Simspons products second.