7 Deadly Gaming Sins - ENVY

7. Fox Straight Up Steals Ideas For The Simpsons

A while back in an old South Park episode, there's a running gag where every single idea Butters tries to come up with has already appeared in an episode of The Simpsons, with "Simpsons did it" becoming an overnight meme. It speaks to the truth that this lumbering yellow dinosaur had seemingly been around since the beginning of TV time so therefore had taken or used and all ideas possible.

Yet it seems this sort of clout didn't extend to the video game industry, because here this yellow-bellied franchise did it's bloody best to try and copy everything under the sun in the pursuit of cold hard cash. Of note three video games, The Simpsons Skateboarding, The Simpsons Road Rage, and The Simpsons Hit And Run all drew the attention of critics and fans alike for their overwhelming similarity to titles already on the market, namely The Tony Hawks Games, Crazy Taxi, and Grand Theft Auto.

Now to be clear in two of these three examples there were enough notable differences to elevate the games in question from straight-up theft to loose "homages" and in the case of Simpsons Skateboarding, another noticeable difference was that Tony Hawks 5 played better than this hot garbage, but Road Rage was another matter entirely.

This game was such a blatant rip-off that SEGA lawyered up and told Fox that they were directly stealing the core gameplay from Crazy Taxi. It was a blatant example of Fox trying to weasel into a niche market that Crazy Taxi had made for itself, but their envious moves were too lazy and obvious and so the matter was settled out of court for an undisclosed sum.

Tut. Tut.