The Simpsons: Hit and Run’s most bizarre crossover mod celebrates its first birthday

The Simpsons: Hit and Run is an integral part of many of our childhoods, and the creators of one of its most hilarious mods have recently celebrated their unhinged work’s first birthday by recording a full director’s commentary.

If you’re unfamiliar with ‘Hell Inspector’s Mod of Stupidity’, I’m not quite sure I can sum it up while properly doing it justice, but here goes. Imagine taking the already rather wacky 2003 safe-for-kids GTA clone, and making it even stranger by adding a bunch of new missions to it that bring to life a tale involving an array of iconic characters from other shows and games.

That’s pretty much the formula for the mod, which was finally released by its main creator – the aptly-named Hell Inspector – this time last year and has now turned one. To commemorate the occasion, the modder has roped a couple of fellow modders, Nightbane and Tappie, into doing a full director’s commentary playthrough of the mod 12’s missions.

If you give it a watch, you’ll likely be rather distracted by what’s going on visually, as Homer accepts various missions from the likes of Wallace – of Wallace and Gromit fame – Hank Hill and also interacts with some characters from Mario games like Waluigi and Toad. In case you were wondering, an evil version of Mr Bean (yes, that one) serves as the mod’s main villain.

That said, the commentary does feature some interesting discussion of how The Simpsons: Hit and Run’s modding scene has evolved over the years, with the trio outlining that fact that a number of the game’s older mods simply revolved around trying to make the game harder (as if that’s necessary) or adding in missions that mirrored the vanilla game’s style.

Since that point, things have gotten a lot more ambitious, with mods like Colou’s ‘Storm Over Springfield’, which turns the game into a disaster-prepping sim via a bunch of new missions, interiors and more, having pushed the boat out.

Now, the group argue, is the era when weird stuff like the Mod of Stupidity rules the roost, since it’s getting harder to continue managing to pull off impressive modding feats with the game that no one’s seen before.

Who knows where Simpsons: Hit and Run modding will go next? Well, if it’s anything like Bethesda game modding, the answer’s probably Thomas the Tank Engine.