Simpsons Jeopardy!
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Simpsons Jeopardy! began as a board game (published by Pressman®) which took the popular game show "Jeopardy!" and themed it to the long-running animated series "The Simpsons". The game contained a Jeopardy! style plastic board behind which question sheets could be inserted. Small clickers were included for "buzzing in". 40 game sheets, each containing 25 questions for (single) Jeopardy! and 25 questions for Double Jeopardy! brought the total number of questions to 2000, all of which were Simpsons trivia.
While many Simpsons fans found the game was a great deal of fun, it required at least 3 people to play. The very nature of the game made it hard to enjoy when trying to playing alone. In an effort to correct this, an anonymous amateur programmer decided to take the game and make a freeware homebrew PC game of it. It was not retail-quality, but it was a simple, straight-forward trivia game with a Jeopardy! theme. The final version was designed with longevity through customizability in mind. New characters could be added through the use of Character Packs and question sets could be easily altered, added and/or removed.
Strangely, the game was programmed using Indigo Rose's "AutoPlay Media Studio", a program designed for making auto-play CDs and DVDs. Still, it worked well for such an unintended purpose. It worked fine for US Windows-based PCs, however it was not playable on Mac or Linux systems. To boot, non-US Windows version had difficulty handling certain text commands native to the program.
At the time of this writing, the Simpsons Jeopardy! PC game remains an underground-esque project. It is presently being ported to Macromedia Shockwave. This effort will not only increase the chances of making it playable on all international version of Windows, but also make it playable on Macintosh systems with the Flash Player. It is estimated that the new version, dubbed "Simpsons Jeopardy! SWF" will be available around the beginning of 2006.
