When you complete the level, via a congratulatory letter that praises you for being a “golden boy” (clearly Theme Hospital was no place to be an ambitious woman), you have to start building your hospital from scratch again.
And then, just when things are ticking over, the doctors start demanding more money, which apparently they can do, despite character traits like “baits tourists” and “furtive gardener”. You’ve barely built your pharmacy and hired your first doctor (all male) and receptionist (female, obviously), before a VIP wants to visit and there are rats running around the hospital floor. The first thing I learned about playing Theme Hospital again for the first time in 20 years is that you need to be fast. And so I found myself on her sofa, drinking prosecco and watching the opening animation of Theme Hospital.
“I downloaded it again the other week,” she told me.
Science and Technical Research and Developmentīut why did we, as nine or ten-year-old girls, love it so much? Shortly before speaking to Carr and Webley, I asked a friend who had been part of our pre-adolescent gaming posse about it. Infrastructure Management - Transport, Utilities. Information Services, Statistics, Records, Archives. Information and Communications Technology. HR, Training and Organisational Development. Health - Medical and Nursing Management. Facility / Grounds Management and Maintenance. “The fun of it was because we were making a piece of entertainment, making the strange illnesses.” We weren’t medical people, so why not rack the whole thing up and make it ridiculous?” “This was never about taking the mickey out of the health service,” Mark Webley, the producer and designer of Theme Hospital adds. “So we just tried to take the comical approach. “We were seeing all these really quite horrific things that people go through in their lives and it isn’t easy to turn that into entertainment,” Gary Carr, the artist for Theme Hospital, tells the New Statesman. In fact, despite visiting several British hospitals and even observing surgery in research for their game, its makers decided to inject comedy rather than gritty realism. “A grisly computer game which shows a doctor operating with a chainsaw is to be used as a training aid for NHS managers,” the Evening Standard reported in the month of its release, adding that medical groups had condemned the game. Perhaps it is not surprising then, that Theme Hospital’s initial press diagnosis was deeply serious. Tony Blair had spent the run up to the poll attacking the Tories for mismanagement of the NHS and promising to build hospitals. Theme for hospital Pc#
Crammed into the downstairs cupboard of her parents’ – themselves doctors – otherwise large and lovely home, we became the masters of our own hospital, Theme Hospital: a pastel-coloured, retro-patterned, pixelated dolls house in which there were counterproductive numbers of KitKat machines.Ĭonceived in the dying days of John Major’s Conservative government, Theme Hospital was released on PC in 1997 – the same year as New Labour’s election landslide. As Edinburgh’s doctors dealt with rising obesity and a heroin epidemic, across the city my friend and I were taking on our own medical emergencies: bloated heads and elongated tongues.
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