The Kremlin and Cyrillic Eye Chart in The Simpsons: Hit & Run (2003)
The Simpsons: Hit & Run (2003) is not a game about Russia, the Soviet Union, or Cold War politics. Its Russian references are small, incidental, and easy to miss. Precisely for that reason, they are useful examples of how Russian signs often appear in Western games: not as full representations, but as quick jokes, background details, or visual shorthand.
Two details stand out. The first is the unlockable car named the Kremlin, used by Comic Book Guy. The second is a Cyrillic eye chart placed inside the DMV building in Levels 2 and 5. Neither detail carries narrative importance, but both use Russian-coded material for comic effect.
The "Kremlin" Car
The Kremlin vehicle, Comic Book Guy's car, is almost certainly a joke on the AMC Gremlin, the compact American car produced in the 1970s. The resemblance is both visual and phonetic: Gremlin and Kremlin sound close enough for the name to work as a parody. Instead of simply referencing an odd-looking American hatchback, the game gives it a Russian-sounding twist.
The joke works because the Kremlin is one of the most recognizable symbols of Russia. The Moscow Kremlin is a fortified complex in the center of Moscow, historically associated with Russian rulers, Soviet authority, and the modern Russian state. In English-language media, "the Kremlin" is also often used as shorthand for the Russian government itself.
This makes the car funny in a very Simpsons-like way. A small, unimpressive hatchback receives a name associated with Russian state power, imperial history, Soviet memory, and geopolitical seriousness. The joke is not hostile, but it does rely on Russia as a source of instant symbolic weight. The result is a throwaway gag where a car pun becomes a miniature Russian reference.
The Cyrillic Eye Chart in the DMV
The second reference appears inside the DMV building, where a vision-testing chart is written in Cyrillic rather than Latin letters. At a glance, it resembles a standard eye chart, with large letters at the top and smaller rows underneath. The visible letters include forms such as Ш, Б, М, И, and К.
The chart used in the game closely resembles the real Golovin–Sivtsev table (таблица Головина–Сивцева), the standard Russian visual acuity chart, which opens with the large letters Ш and Б at the top — exactly the letters visible in the Hit & Run texture. That the game's designers replicated this specific layout, whether deliberately or by copying a reference image, means the joke lands on a real object with a concrete medical and institutional history in Russia. The two charts are compared below.
| Feature | Hit & Run texture | Real Golovin–Sivtsev table |
|---|---|---|
| Row 1 | Ш Б — correct | Ш Б |
| Row 2 | М И К — differs | М Н К |
| Row 3 | Ы М Б Ш — correct | Ы М Б Ш |
| Overall fidelity | Plausible recreation — clearly referencing the same source, but not an exact copy | The authentic medical standard used across Russia |
The key discrepancy is in row 2: the game texture shows М И К, whereas the real Golovin–Sivtsev chart reads М Н К. The substitution of И for Н — two visually similar Cyrillic letters — suggests either a misread during asset creation or deliberate simplification. Every other visible row matches the authentic chart closely enough to confirm the source. The developers clearly used the Golovin–Sivtsev table as a reference but did not reproduce it with full accuracy.
The detail is funny because an American player entering a Springfield DMV would expect an ordinary eye test. Instead, the chart uses an alphabet that most people in the United States cannot read. That creates a small visual joke: the player may feel, for a moment, as if they are failing the eye test, when in fact the problem is not vision but script. It turns a familiar bureaucratic object into something suddenly foreign and unreadable.
The placement also matters. The DMV is already a classic American symbol of waiting, paperwork, irritation, and petty officialdom. By adding Cyrillic to that space, the game makes the DMV feel even more absurdly bureaucratic. It is not saying Springfield is Russian; it is using Russian-looking text to make an already miserable institution feel stranger, colder, and more intimidating.
The contrast with its authentic use could not be more direct. The same Golovin–Sivtsev table appears in the Russian film 14+: Продолжение (2023), directed by Andrei Zaytsev, during a military commission health examination for conscripts. In that scene, three doctors in white coats sit behind a desk in a state institution, and the table hangs to their right, unremarkable and functional, simply part of the room.
This contrast is instructive. What Hit & Run deploys as a visual punchline — Cyrillic script in a space where Latin is expected, producing a moment of comic disorientation — is, in the Russian context it imitates, a standard piece of medical equipment found in any clinic, military commission room, or school nurse's office across the country. The same object carries completely different weight depending on where you are standing when you look at it.
Conclusion
These references are minor, but they show how The Simpsons: Hit & Run uses Russian signs in a light comic register. The Kremlin car works as a pun on the AMC Gremlin while also invoking one of Russia's most famous political symbols. The Cyrillic eye chart — modelled, whether intentionally or not, on the real Golovin–Sivtsev table — turns a normal DMV vision test into a joke about unreadability and bureaucratic discomfort. The game texture is not a faithful copy: row 2 substitutes И for the correct Н, and the overall layout is compressed and degraded by texture resolution. But the source is unmistakable. Neither detail is deep enough to support a major political reading, but both belong naturally in the ROMANOV Archive as examples of how Russian-coded signs circulate in Western games as quick, recognizable cultural shorthand: objects stripped of their original context and redeployed as signals of foreignness, weight, or cold institutional strangeness.
The Simpsons: Hit & Run
Title: The Simpsons: Hit & Run
Developer: Radical Entertainment
Publisher: Vivendi Universal Games
Release Year: 2003
Platforms: PlayStation 2, Xbox, GameCube, Windows
Genre: Action-adventure / Driving
The Simpsons: Hit & Run is an action-adventure driving game based on the long-running animated series The Simpsons. Set across multiple areas of Springfield, the game combines mission-based driving, exploration, collectibles, and satirical environmental detail drawn from the series' broader parody of American life.
References
- Radical Entertainment. (2003). The Simpsons: Hit & Run [Video game]. Vivendi Universal Games.
- The Simpsons Wiki. (n.d.). The Simpsons: Hit & Run. https://simpsons.fandom.com/wiki/The_Simpsons:_Hit_%26_Run
- Wikipedia. (n.d.). The Simpsons: Hit & Run. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Simpsons:_Hit_%26_Run
- Wikipedia. (n.d.). AMC Gremlin. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMC_Gremlin
- Wikipedia. (n.d.). Moscow Kremlin. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscow_Kremlin
- Wikipedia. (n.d.). Golovin–Sivtsev table. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golovin%E2%80%93Sivtsev_table
- Zaytsev, A. (Director). (2023). 14+: Продолжение [Film].