Lookin’ Back #12 – Theme Hospital

Much better than being diagnosed with Bloaty Head.

After last month’s article on sequels we would and wouldn’t like to see, I was thinking about Bullfrog’s games.  One of the key people in Bullfrog was a man called Peter Molyneux.  He seems to have slinked off into obscurity.  In any case, Bullfrog made a lot of simulation/strategy games, and one of my personal favourites was called Theme Hospital.

Theme Hospital was a simulation and was the second game in Bullfrog’s ‘Theme’ series, after Theme Park, this time seeing you running a hospital.  It had the usual Bullfrog humour with lots of weird and wonderful diseases that you had to cure.

In each level, you had a set of criteria you had to hit in order to clear it.  Such as the value of your hospital, reputation or the number of patients you’d managed to cure.  This was accomplished by various rooms and types of staff.  Initially, you already knew all the cures for the diseases you had to treat, but later on in the game you would build rooms in order to research and cure other diseases.

There was a lot of micromanagement in this game.  When patients were queued up outside treatment rooms and such, you could change the order of the queue to try and get dying patients treated quickly to prevent them dying and giving you a bad reputation.  You could alternatively throw dying patients out of the hospital as well, if you so wish.

Sometimes you get challenges where you have a set amount of time to cure a certain number of patients of a disease.  If you succeed, you get a reputation boost and a nice amount of cash.

The diseases were quite comical, from completely made up diseases through to exagerrated versions of actual diseases.  One of favourites was ‘Bloaty Head’, which was instantly noticeable by a patient having an inflated head.  In order to treat it, the doctor would pop the patients head, which would then deflate like a balloon.  The doctor would then remove some of the skin and re-inflate the head, and it would inflate to a normal size.  Very silly stuff.

Each disease even had a file with cause, symptoms and cure, which were all funny and weird in some cases.  Some examples include: -

Gut Rot

Cause – Mrs. O’Malley’s Good Time Whisky Cough Mixture.

Symptoms – No cough but no stomach-wall lining either.

Cure – A Nurse can administer a selection of dissolved chemicals to coat the tum.

TV Personalities

Cause – Daytime television.

Symptoms – Delusions of being able to present a cookery show.

Cure – A trained Psychiatrist must convince the patient to sell their TV and buy a radio.
Personally, I’d love to see a re-release of this game on Steam.  In fact, I’d like to see a lot of Bullfrog’s back catalogue re-issued.  Unlikely, but I can dream.

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