Hit & Run in the browser

A Three.js reconstruction of The Simpsons: Hit & Run using assets converted from a local PS2 disc image. It runs without PS2 emulation. New Game starts the original campaign. Story progression, bonus missions and races run from the converted mission scripts. The engine is still a reconstruction, and full playthrough testing is ongoing.

Play in your browser · How the port was built · Native executable findings

Watch the trailer: mission action, police pursuits, crate smashes and ramp jumps, with original cutscenes and game audio.

The repository includes the converted browser assets, so you can clone it and play without running the extraction tools. The ISO, raw archives and extracted source files are excluded. This is an unofficial project, with no affiliation to the original developers or rights holders. Original game assets retain their existing copyrights.

Build and play locally

Install Node.js 24+ and clone the repository (the included assets are about 1.09 GB):

git clone https://github.com/Vheissu/hit-and-run-web.git
cd hit-and-run-web
npm ci
npm run dev -- --port 5174

Open the address printed by Vite. The server binds to 127.0.0.1.

Press Start, then New Game. Escape opens the pause menu. Options contains the level, vehicle, lighting and rendering settings.

Control	Action
W A S D / arrows	Drive or move on foot
Space	Handbrake; jump, then press again near the apex to double jump
E	Talk, enter buildings, enter or leave your vehicle
F	Kick on foot
Enter	Retry a failed mission
Shift	Run on foot
C	Change camera
B	Look behind
H	Cruise at 50 km/h
R	Return to the road and repair
M	Zoom radar
P	Hide/show HUD
Escape	Pause/resume
F3	Frame timings and diagnostics

Touch driving controls and standard gamepad steering/triggers are available. Full gamepad menu navigation remains unfinished.

Using Docker

With Docker and Docker Compose installed, you can run the dev server without installing Node.js:

git clone https://github.com/Vheissu/hit-and-run-web.git
cd hit-and-run-web
docker compose up

Open http://localhost:5173. The container bind-mounts the repository, so edits on the host are picked up by Vite's dev server inside the container.

Current work

• Seven level variants and five player characters, with original geometry, character animations, UI artwork, bitmap fonts, and the animated living-room menu.
• Four-wheel vehicle suspension, tyre forces, airborne rotation and collision recovery. Traffic, police and mission vehicles use steering and pedal inputs on the same solver. Source lane data replaces the earlier two-way interpretation of directional road quads. Physics findings and remaining differences.
• Walking, double jumping, vehicle-roof support, coin trails and bouncing crate rewards. The world includes 5,486 static and interactive prop placements. Vehicle damage, local saves and the added five-stop time trial remain available.
• Interpolated player and NPC motion, continuous junction paths, and grass placement spread across frames.
• Walking collision uses 9,549 original exterior static shapes across seven levels, plus 487 shapes from the 19 interiors. Buildings block movement before the door interaction; entering switches to the room's original floor and solid shapes. Primitive dimensions were checked against the PS2 executable.
• Hit & Run heat, police pursuit, capture and the 50-coin penalty use rules traced through the PS2 executable. Level seven uses the original pursuit hearses. Traffic uses the original five-slot groups, and NPC impacts play the original flail/get-up animations. Pursuit findings and remaining differences.
• A Blender scenery pass over 100 exterior/interior files: preserved UVs and baked colors, rounded hard edges, and 11 surface-detail material classes covering 1,672 textures. Enlarging source artwork does not recover missing detail; signs and illustrations still retain their original designs and resolution limits.
• 89 scripted missions across seven chapters: 49 story missions, the opening tutorial, four chapter transitions, seven bonus missions, 21 street races and seven wager races. The 610 stages include original objectives, timers, failure conditions, checkpoints, purchases, rewards and chapter progression.
• Original mission dialogue, opening/campaign movies, briefings, NPC conversation animations, accessible interiors, delivery and destruction targets, multi-lap races and nuclear-waste/UFO objectives. There are 67 character models, 71 vehicle models and 549 dialogue clips, plus 55 original mission briefing pictures.
• Saves resume from the latest mission checkpoint and preserve coins, purchased cars, outfits and completed missions. Bonus missions return to the story checkpoint afterward.

This is not yet a 1:1 port. Vehicle handling and AI now use rules recovered from the executable, but the rigid-body solver, collision response and driver control remain reconstructed systems. Traffic lights, parked traffic, boarding ordinary traffic vehicles, gags, free prop motion and debris, collectible-card gameplay and menu parity still need work. Mission AI and the UFO sequence use reconstructed behavior; their timing and difficulty have not been validated against complete original-game playthroughs. The original executable is not being recompiled.

Around Springfield

Evergreen Terrace	Downtown

The waterfront	Kwik-E-Mart

How this came together

This began with a PAL PS2 ISO and the idea of driving around Springfield in a browser. The archives were extracted, Pure3D geometry and PS2 vertex data were decoded, and the original textures, skeletons, animations and mission scripts were converted for a new Three.js runtime. The PS2 executable is not being emulated or recompiled.

The first build used custom menus and a custom HUD. Those were replaced with the original Scrooby artwork and bitmap fonts. Blender handled the scenery and vehicle passes; Codex worked through the reconstruction, and Claude improved loading with WebP textures and concurrent downloads.

Read the full porting backstory for the format problems, the campaign pipeline and the work that remains.

Rebuild assets from a disc

The included browser assets are already converted. To regenerate them, install Python 3.11+, 7-Zip (7zz), FFmpeg with AAC/IPU support, and Blender 5.1+. Conversion is tested against the PAL PS2 disc; other releases have not been verified.

python3 -m pip install -r requirements.txt
npm run extract -- --iso '/path/to/your/Hit and Run.iso'
npm run convert
npm run campaign:convert
npm run pursuit:convert
npm run remaster
blender --background --factory-startup --python tools/campaign_cars.py
blender --background --factory-startup --python tools/scenery_remaster.py
npm run pursuit:remaster
npm run movement:convert
npm run vehicles:repair-uv
npm run bus:remaster

The input ISO is only read. On macOS, npm run remaster detects /Applications/Blender.app. Set BLENDER_PATH for another installation. Use Blender's full executable path in the two direct commands if it is not on PATH.

Tests

npm run test:unit  # Uses included browser assets; no raw disc extraction
npm run build
npm test           # Also checks locally converted assets

CI runs the full suite against the included browser assets, then builds the code. Checks cover geometry, collision datasets, character textures, skin weights, UI resources, Blender exports, pursuit rules and traffic spawning. The raw extraction-manifest check runs only when the disc has been extracted locally. Campaign checks exercise every compiled stage with valid objective events and verify resource references; they do not establish that every mission has been played through in the browser. The production build currently has a bundle-size warning.

Format references

• Donut Team Pure3D documentation
• Donut Team mission command documentation
• Hampo's LuaP3DLib
• Luigi Auriemma's Radcore archive documentation
• PS2SDK VIF documentation

Original project code is available under the MIT license. That license does not grant rights to the original game or its assets.