Publisher: Electronic Arts
Developer: Bullfrog Productions
Platform: PC
Release date: 1997
Genre: Management
I realised everything had gone terribly, horribly, grotesquely wrong when three people died in the waiting room. This was a waiting room, mind you, that might’ve had a bit of vomit on the floor. Quite a bit. In fact, by “quite a bit”, I mean the entire room was what a dauntless, edgy interior decorator might describe as “late modern post-industrial vomit with linoleum accents and rats”. And the linoleum and rats were probably pre-ingested. Three of my cleaning staff had walked due to some sort of wage dispute, and the other guy was busy fixing the broken operating theatre at the time. I mean, seriously, managing a hospital isn’t as easy as it looks. There’s a lot more vomit than you’d expect.
Following on from 1994’s Theme Park (another game prominently featuring vomit), Bullfrog’s Theme Hospital took all that theme park management stuff and made it hospital management stuff instead. This was back when Peter Molyneux used to have ideas that actually worked because they were simple and straightforward. In Theme Hospital, you hire a bunch of doctors, nurses, and handymen, build a bunch of consulting rooms and treatment facilities for them to work in, and then desperately try and prevent the whole lot from exploding.
Patients arrive with any of an assortment of bizarre afflictions and conditions, including something called “Slack Tongue”, “Discrete Itching”, and “Spare Ribs”. The big idea is to get these people diagnosed by a doctor, and then treated – a premise that sounds about as easy as it actually isn’t, especially when there’s an outbreak of “The Squits” and the queue outside the lobby bogs is twelve class action lawsuits deep. And then there’s an earthquake.
Treatments vary from medication through surgical intervention and everything in between, including a DNA Fixer that rids patients of alien infestation. Cure enough patients, and your hospital’s reputation will increase. Kill them, and people will avoid your hospital like… well, like the plague it’s probably got smeared all over the walls. And when you’re not busy doing all of that, your staff will complain about their salaries. Theme Hospital keeps it real like that.
Although I played loads of Theme Park way back when (and still do, actually, now on DS), I somehow managed to miss out on Theme Hospital the first time around. But playing it even now, over a decade on, the game’s a total blast. While it starts out easily enough, it quickly becomes a brutal, relentless challenge of you versus time and everything doing its very best to go very bad. This is old skool management gaming at its most ruthless, and it really is a tremendous shame that, outside of the Sims franchise, the genre’s fallen almost entirely out of development.
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