Sometimes you have an idea that is just so awesome, that the only possible reason it hasn't already been done must be that there are sinister forces at work actively conspiring against it. Yesterday I wondered why there isn't a Sims expansion pack containing all the characters from Springfield. It would be called – obviously – The Sims-sons.

EA already has a licensed Simpsons game so it's not exactly a radical departure but the Sims demographic doesn't really overlap much with that of other video games (which is a polite way of saying it's only played by girls) and there are already lots of unofficial Simpsons mods out there so the demand is clearly there. All EA has to do is clamp itself onto the teat and suckle.

Truth according to the internet

Now I am aware, of course, that there may be all sorts of trivial and tedious legal, logistic, market segmentation and return-on-investment reasons why no one has got around to this yet but I am dismissing these out of hand. This is the internet, after all. What we really need is a decent conspiracy theory to explain it all. So here's what I think:

There already is a Simpsons pack for the Sims. It was developed five years ago by 3D Realms when they were supposed to be working on Duke Nukem Forever. Because EA was then in talks with Fox Media for a licence to its their own Simpsons game, it turned down the 3D Realms pack. Consequently it was sold to the Taliban, who were looking for a video game that didn't involve gratuitous nudity.

During the allied bombing campaign there, it was smuggled across the border into Pakistan. Some of the sound samples used by Professor Frink in the game, inadvertently contained hints that would be useful in the development of weapons-grade plutonium and this information was acquired by Baathist agents in Iraq in early 2003.

Cartoon calamity

Concerned that Saddam Hussein might develop weapons of mass destruction based on a cartoon show, the US and British coalition forces moved swiftly to invade Iraq on the 20th March and the gold master discs for the Sims-sons were captured by US special forces during fierce house-to-house fighting in Fallujah. Since then the game has been languishing on an old Dell Centrino laptop at Guantanamo.

This is just the same old thing that prevents most of you from being able to play World of Starcraft, even though the servers have been up for nearly a year. Oh no wait, you're not supposed to know about that. Forget I said anything.