Here, at the End of All Things
This column is a reprint from Unwinnable Monthly #183. If you like what you see, grab the magazine for less than ten dollars, or subscribe and get all future magazines for half price.
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Now this.
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For all of my avid readers out there, and I know there are dozens of you, you’ll remember my feature from a couple years ago about my love for The Simpsons: Tapped Out. At that point, I had been playing the game nearly every day for around a decade, and my Springfield was pretty well developed. Since then, though, life changed, and TS:TO fell off my daily tasks of things to do. My Springfield sat, gathering digital cobwebs, waiting for me to come back. But the longer I didn’t play, the more difficult it was to return, until, a couple months ago, EA announced a major development – they were shutting TS:TO down. As of January 2025, they will no longer be supporting the game, and the servers will stop updating, and the 13-year game will come to a close.
Having not played in a couple years, this wasn’t as big a blow to me as it was to some. But it did get me to redownload the game, just to take one last look at my design. I scoped out some great memories – my slick downtown mall, my beautiful Krustyland, my miscellaneous Halloween events section and my ladder to heaven which led directly to God sitting on a cloud throne. All of these memories will be lost, like tears in the rain.
But I guess that was always a possibility. After all, EA never promised anything other than that possibility with TS:TO. It was always a digital first game, primarily played in mobile, never having any physical backups available. The potential mass destruction of all Springfields was always hovering just beyond the horizon until this fall. Fundamentally, it’s the reason I never spent too much money on the game. I won’t lie, I definitely spent something in the low three digits on unique items and donuts over the years, but I always knew to be cautious and to have a few back channels for extras as needed.
Maybe that’s because I was burned before. TS:TO isn’t even the first Simpsons branded game to suffer this fate. The Simpsons: Hit & Run, potentially the greatest GTA clone ever, is extremely difficult to find and play on modern technology (if anybody in power reads this, please god release Hit & Run for modern consoles – I will easily pay as much as a AAA game for it). Despite not being accessible though, you could still theoretically play Hit & Run if you had saved the discs and your PS2. You would still have the hard and software.
That’s never going to be the case for TS:TO though. Once it’s gone, it’s gone. We never owned it in the first place. Now, of course, some enterprising individuals are already starting up some servers that allow you to keep playing, but that is unreliable at best. With a bit of a head start and headache, you should be able to see your Springfield again and even edit it, but it’s going to be a tricky enterprise for many users. And, it’s going to rely on the generosity of strangers, who may give up or otherwise not be able to continue running the servers.
To be clear, this is not a screed against mobile games or digital only purchases. I already picked up SimCity: Buildit again to get my city building fix. But it is a cautionary tale. Lack of archiving services in the games community has already meant that many games have been lost, and as more games become digital only, with no physical component, I do feel like the work put in, the fun had and the spaces built, will amount to nothing. At least, in the case of TS:TO, I got some nice screenshots.
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Noah Springer is a writer and editor based in St. Louis. You can follow him on Bluesky @noahspringer.com.
