This fan-made UE5 remake of The Simpsons: Hit & Run looks incredible, and we'll never, ever get to play it

And another finger on the monkey paw curls. A plan to remake The Simpsons: Hit & Run—the beloved PS2 GTA 3-like from 2003—has reached its conclusion. A joint effort by devs going by the names Reubs and Korylon, the project kicked off a year ago and was an attempt to recreate the original game in UE5 as a fully open-world (meaning all its maps combined into one) experience.

The project is now finished, meaning the first chunk of the game can be experienced in its entirety. Just not by you or me. Copyright law dictates that Reubs can't distribute the remake without being lawyered into oblivion by whichever corporation happens to own the rights to The Simpsons: Hit & Run in 2023, so we'll just have to settle for gazing longingly at a 22-minute YouTube video, which you can see above.

I'm not entirely sure if the devs have remade more of the game than they've shown off in their videos (though I suspect not). I've reached out to ask them about that, and will update this piece if I hear back.

It's seriously impressive stuff. The cutscenes play seamlessly, missions move from objective to objective, Homer bombs around Springfield in that trademark pink car with grace and alacrity, and Lisa's hair looks like a ghastly tesseract that will pursue me to my grave. It's all there! Just not for the taking. 

Reubs runs a Patreon for their game development course, and also sells an Unreal Engine plugin, which answers the question as to why on Earth they wanted to make a remake of The Simpsons: Hit & Run if not to distribute it among the public. Perhaps that's good news: If you absolutely have to play the remake, you could always try to make it yourself. After all, you can watch the other nine parts of Reubs' series on remaking Hit & Run over on their YouTube channel to get some idea of how they did it.

But if, somehow, you lack the wherewithal to do that, I suppose the closest we can get is that mod that stitches the entire original game together. Do you ever get the feeling someone should just officially remake this thing already?