Uploaded February 2026 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago

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A playthrough of Acclaim's 1992 license-based action game for the Super Nintendo, The Simpsons: Bart's Nightmare.

I get the best ending in this playthrough. You can see the other endings at 33:25.

Bart's Nightmare was the fourth of five Simpsons video games released in 1992, and following three months behind Krusty's Super Fun House, it was the second to show up on the Super Nintendo. The Sega Genesis port came out about a year later.

The premise is that Bart has fallen asleep at his desk after finishing his homework (because that's totally something Bart would do). He dreams that a gust of wind has come along and swept all eight pages out his bedroom window, and his imagination cooks up a variety of scenarios in which he becomes his own hero on a quest to save the fruits of his labor.

As the game begins, Bart is dropped into a nightmare version of his neighborhood, the "Windy World," where everyone and everything is out to make his life miserable. After enough running from Skinner, Jimbo, and hungry mailboxes, a page will blow by. When he catches it, Bart will be presented with the choice of two doors, and these lead to the game's five primary stages.

Each stage offers a different type of gameplay. The orange door plunks Bart down in an Indiana Jones parody where you'll have to whip and puzzle your way across a room of collapsing columns as you dodge demons and giant pacifiers. The purple door leads to Bart's bloodstream, where you'll pop blood cells with a tire pump while being taunted by Ross Perot. The green door poses Bart as Godzilla, eye-lasering and fire-breathing his way through downtown before scaling a skyscraping and electrocuting King Kong Homer. The blue door sends you to the skies as Bartman, dodging drones and toxic clouds as you take down Mr. Burns (as the Red Baron) with a slingshot. And finally, behind the yellow door lies an episode of The Itchy & Scratchy Show, where Bart has to avoid being mangled by Hell's resident Tom and Jerry impersonators.

Every contemporary review of Bart's Nightmare heaped praise on how well the game captured the show's look and sense of humor, and all these years later, it still looks fantastic. The license aside, the graphics were the main selling point, and they delivered.

The reviews were somewhat less positive when it came to the gameplay, and reading over them again, I have to say that I agree with most of their complaints. The controls are loose and maddeningly inconsistent between game types, and the game tends to be incredibly frustrating. It doesn't make any effort to ease you in, and nothing about it is ever intuitive. Only after trial-and-erroring your way through an endless parade of deaths will you eventually begin to figure out what's expected from you in any given stage.

It's easy to blow through the game once you've committed everything memory, but I imagine that most people will have quit long before getting to that point. Bart's Nightmare does a lot of things well, but it would've been so much more fun had the gameplay been given the same attention and polish as was lavished on the presentation. I liked it, but I really wanted to love it.

I suppose that, as Bart said in season 2, "part of this D- belongs to God." Given the choice, I'd rather play Bart vs. the Space Mutants.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.

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