Nurse - the Screens! Inside the lovely, horrible world of Theme Hospital.

Posted by: Paul Smith

The concept is simple. It's a hospital. People come in with illnesses, your excellent staff cure them, and they go home happy - like holding a mirror up to real life, in fact.

The hospital you will be building, however, is more akin to the child of a diabolical union between Fawlty Towers, Green Wing and Carry On Doctor. Your patients will be troubled by Bloaty Head, which will need deflating, or Slack Tongue, which will need trimming up with a guillotine. You'll need to shoot any rats you find scurrying about the place quickly, before anyone sees them. Scrimp on your cleaning budget and risk entire corridors being literally swept away on a tidal wave of vomit.

It's time, then, to snap on your rubber gloves, polish your stethescope and prepare to cure the afflicted as we explore the demented world of Theme Hospital.

This madhouse of a game perhaps best typifies Bullfrog Productions' approach to software design during their ten year romp around the hard drives, from 1987 to 1997. Theme Hospital was the sequel to Theme Park, and was intended to be the second in a never-completed franchise that was eventually beaten to the punch by the Manager series - Hotel, Golf Course, Shopping Mall, Airport and so on, apparantly for ever.

Having inherited what is essentially a big empty building, the player would set about hiring staff - the best the budget would stretch to, with the crucial trait of being able to work when tired - and designing the general layout of the curative powerhouse he was to run. This was simple enough, and involved juggling GP's offices, diagnostic rooms, treatment facilities, and wards and special care for long term patients.

Ah, the patients. It would be so much easier without them, of course. They wander in, are directed to the appropriate queue by your reception staff and stand around looking poorly until you sort them out. Chuck a few yukka plants about the place - they like that sort of thing. Also, some benches for them to sit on is a nice touch, and plenty of vending machines. If you're keeping one eye on your profits - and you'll need to be, this being an American hospital - you'll have benches next to radiators so that your patients get hot and buy, presumably, Theme Coke from your vending machines. Whlie the player has no direct control over the ailing hordes, individual patients can be picked up and moved about if, for example, they are dying and need treatment quickly. Staff, too, can be hurled into areas where they are most urgently needed by this method.

It all sounds like plain sailing. Sounds like, yes. But really, this is a fiendishly difficult game once it gets going, with epidemics, staff walk outs, emergencies, and the attention of the Ministry of Health. The ability to micro manage is very much required, as individual salaries need to be negotiated, treatment costs set, and a constant attention paid to the overall reputation of the hospital - which, ultimately, is what will make or break it.

Theme Hospital is a visually lovely game, all bouncy and colourful, and aesthetically remarkable for the time. In this particular respect, it has managed to pull off the happy trick of being completely finished graphics-wise, such that having any of the subsequent technological advances inflicted upon it would only detract from the whole atmosphere. Get a copy from eBay or download it or something - processing the poorly will never be this much fun again.

  About the author

Paul Smith

When not writing stuff for us, Paul has his own blog here. It deals mainly with his war of attrition with the general public, a conflict in which neither side seems to want to back down.

You'd either have to be mad, or just have something better to do, to miss it.

He has Twitter, too, if you fancy it.