Slowly but surely, Theme Hospital starts encouraging petty acts of financially-motivated evil – like turning the heating down a few degrees to keep staff working harder, or installing a fizzy drinks vending machine instead of giving patients free drinking water. But playing Theme Hospital, I felt like I could run one anyway, if only I really wanted to.Īs you rise up the star ranks of hospital management, however, this cutesy-looking game takes a dark and satirical turn. And look, I’m under no illusions everyone can agree it would be completely catastrophic if I was placed in charge of a medical facility. Maybe it was the copious amount of painkillers in my system, but – for a fleeting second – I felt like I could improve the building’s ergonomic flow if only somebody would take a chance on me. A few years ago, after smashing my wrist to pieces in a ‘snowboarding accident’ (I had a board strapped to my foot at the time, so it counts even though I was technically standing still), I found myself feeling incredibly displeased by the A&E’s puzzling seat arrangements. To this day, I find it impossible to set foot in a hospital without wanting to plonk an extra bunch of houseplants next to the pharmacy, or longing for a nearby KitKat vending machine. At first, there’s something incredibly fulfilling about hovering your benevolent cursor over high-priority admissions and whisking them to the front of the queue, and conducting vital research into curing more complicated diseases like The Squits the whole hospital operating like a satisfyingly well-oiled machine. Initially, the goal of Theme Hospital is simple enough – players buy chairs for waiting rooms, hire a competent medical team, and build enough facilities to cure the local community of fictional ailments such as bloaty head, the uncommon cold, broken wind, and King Complex (a narcissistic condition which causes people to impersonate Elvis Presley). And out of the whole lot, Theme Hospital was the pinnacle – the perfect blend of dark humour and sheer silliness. Ruling over entire metropolises on SimCity gave me a giddying God complex, and tinkering to find the ideal recipe on Lemonade Stand was weirdly meditative. I’d spend hours shooting fictional feature films on studio management game The Movies, and painstakingly crafting death-defying rides for RollerCoaster Tycoon. Instead, I was obsessed with anything that mimicked real life. READ MORE: Grant Kirkhope on ‘Banjo Kazooie Re-Jiggyed’: “I look back and I go, how the bloody hell did that happen?”Īs a kid, I was too much of a gigantic wimp to play games with feral zombies and rabid wolves.And yet, instead, I spent an unhealthy proportion of my childhood moving potted plants around waiting rooms, hiring and firing doctors with Alan Sugar levels of abandon, and monitoring the flow of little pixelated blobs through my lovingly constructed triage system. Surely games should be about escapism, not filling in endless patient risk assessments while a middle-manager called Sandra honks her coffee-breath down your neck? Given the choice between shooting at mutant aliens with a laser bazooka or running an efficient healthcare system in a business simulation game, you’d expect the space-adventuring to win out every single time. On paper at least, Theme Hospital feels like the most dreary concept imaginable.

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