The Simpsons is making one hell of a resurgence right now. Alongside the series’ second movie now in the works, the ever-living cartoon franchise has jumped into Fortnite for an epic new season that not only adds new skins to unlock, but also an entire new island filled with iconic locations from the show.

Alex Hutchinson, one of the designers of The Simpsons Game, recently sat down with FRVR to discuss his career, including the decision to kill of Desmond Miles in Assassin’s Creed. While the designer has a unique relationship with The Simpsons Game, the veteran game developer admits that the game is actually quite “underrated”.

Hutchinson’s work on The Simpsons Game was actually only in the early days of its development as the game developer was instead shifted to work on Spore. However, in that period, Hutchinson developed the unique powers of the world’s most loved family that were surprisingly kept 1:1 by the game’s final release.

“The core of The Simpsons Game team was The Sims 2 console team,” Hutchinson said. “So we went from Sims 2 console and all of us had been, ‘well, we don’t wanna keep doing ports’, or not ports but adaptations of things, we wanted to do something original. So EA had gone, well, that had made a lot of money, it has been a pretty clean development, so they gave us… the reins of The Simpsons Game.

“I did the initial design, it was a very strange experience,” he continued. “I did the initial design, the sort of creative brief, here are the abilities of the family, it’s sort of a hub of the town of Springfield, and you go into missions. We had different ideas of boss battles. And then I got the call to go over to Spore, so they went on, but the weird thing is that it was exactly the abilities that shipped were exactly the abilities in that first creative brief. So, it was kinda a strange experience as a game developer to fire that off, two years later come back, and play your ideas finished but by someone else.”

Hutchinson explained that—while the game wasn’t the best game ever made—he does believe the game to be “underrated”. While the world still remembers The Simpsons: Hit and Run, EA’s big budget adventure game was also a fantastic take on the world of the cartoon.

“I think that game is underrated,” Hutchinson said. “Yeah, I think it came together pretty well and, you know, being able to walk around a recreation of Springfield was pretty fun in of itself.”

It also wasn’t entirely easy to make. The Simpsons Game lets you play as every member of the family—even allowing you to crawl through vents as Maggie—and designing some of those character’s abilities was quite difficult, whereas now you can just shove someone in Fortnite and give them a gun.

Marge, for example, controlled a massive mob of Springfield’s actual residents, rallying them to fight for her, and that was pretty much all Hutchinson could come up with. “It’s because we couldn’t… it’s like, what could we do? You have sort of terrible ideas, you don’t want her hitting people, it just doesn’t make sense, right? So, we thought a rallying cry, sort of organising people seemed to fit as the voice of reason within the family. That’s why I’m saying it’s surprising because it was the best first idea I could’ve come up with for Marge. So it was sort of surprising because I expected it to change.”

In 2007, when the game came out, The Simpsons was already feeling like the wind was out of its sails. While the movie was also releasing to a huge box office, the show itself didn’t have the gravitas it once did, merchandise was less prevalent and it felt like maybe there was only a few years left. Little did we know.

“I think after, you know, 4 to 9 or whatever seasons that were pretty big, it did feel like it had gone over the hill a little bit,” Hutchinson said. “But it was still pretty exciting to work on it. I think anything that goes on that long—what is it 30 years or something now—it gets pretty tricky. I mean, they’re going to start dealing with the actors dying soon.”

To this day, despite the fact that the show is far worse than it was for its first ten seasons, The Simpsons still brings in a huge crowd. As someone who hasn’t enjoyed a modern episode since the mid-2000s, I still love The Simpsons stuff I love, and I’ll definitely be there for the family’s, potentially, last hurrah when the second movie launches in 2027.