Theme Hospital

Theme Hospital is a simulation computer game developed by Bullfrog Productions and published by Electronic Arts in 1997, in which the player designs and operates a hospital. Like most of Bullfrog's games, Theme Hospital is permeated by an eccentric sense of humor. The game is the thematic successor to Theme Park, a game also produced by Bullfrog.

General information
The game is set in a hospital, and requires the player to build an environment which will attract patients with comical complaints, illnesses, emergencies, and diseases. The game has a somewhat dark sense of humour, which is similar to that of Theme Park in many ways. The player has no direct control over the patients that wander the hospital, although gameplay largely centers on influencing their actions in one way or another. The player does, however, have the ability to pick up any staff member in the building and move them to a different area (to speed up their movement from place to place) and to expel any patients from the hospital (if they are being a nuisance, causing rowdiness or about to die and affect the hospital's statistics).

Each level consists of an empty hospital to plan and design, with set goals in the fields of financial attainment, patients cured, percent of patients cured, and hospital value. Holding negative funds or allowing sufficient patients to die will bring about losing requirements. When the goals have been met the player has the option to move on to a new, more elaborate hospital with tougher winning conditions and more diseases present. The final level in the game, 'Battenburg' consists of an enormous, yet somewhat awkward, hospital with all the diseases and rooms in the game present, all disasters frequent and very high winning requirements.

Gameplay


The game revolves around buying and placing rooms (or facilities) in a hospital, and hiring doctors, nurses, site managers/handymen and receptionists to operate it. Some rooms are fundamentally required for the running of the hospital, such as GP's offices, Staff Rooms, and Toilets, while others provide optional services (such as General Diagnosis rooms, Scanner Rooms and X-Rays). Some rooms are dedicated to the treatment of a specific illness, and a number of rooms contain machinery that has to be repaired occasionally.

Patients are attracted to the hospital, in part, by the reputation of the hospital and the cost of treatment there. They arrive with a number of amusing fictional illnesses which must be diagnosed and cured to earn money and achieve targets set by the game. Rooms and equipment to treat fictional and comical diseases such as Bloaty Head, Slack Tongue, Heaped Piles, Uncommon Cold and The Squits must be researched before they can be placed in the hospital. Advanced levels in the game feature epidemics where the player must try to stop a disease infecting other patients by curing infected patients and vaccinating others. Medical emergencies also take place, where several patients must be cured within a specified time limit, and earthquakes occur which damage equipment.

At the end of each year, the player can be presented with several awards based on their performance and management of their hospital.

Staff
The success of any hospital lies in hiring well-trained staff. Staff are separated into four categories of expertise: Doctor, Nurse, Site Manager/Handyman, and Receptionist. Stereotypically, all Doctors and Handymen are male, while all Nurses and Receptionists are female.

Doctors usually demand higher wages than the other three occupations, and also serve a much larger role; they can diagnose and heal most illnesses, they can research new illnesses and equipment and they can train other doctors. Doctors can specialize in psychiatry, surgery or research (or any combination of the three) and they pass their specialization(s) to the doctors they train. Nurses run the Pharmacy, the room for Orthopedic casts and the hospital ward. Handymen clean the hospital, repair machinery and water the plants.

Staff are affected both by tiredness and warmth, which must be cared for if the staff are to remain content. Use of staff rooms allows staff to be rested, which can be furnished with a number of relaxing and entertaining devices. Placing a suitable number of radiators in rooms allows staff to be kept warm. Having the staff overworked often results in the staff demanding a raise and threatening to quit.

Micromanagement
Micromanagement is heavily present in Theme Hospital, and it can influence both the hospital's efficiency and its reputation. The player must arrange and furnish the rooms to minimize the time required for the doctors to perform their tasks and satisfy the needs of their patients. These needs include a comfortable temperature (neither too hot nor too cold), a clean environment, benches to sit on, and access to drinks and toilets. Furthermore, the player can manually pick up members of the staff and drop them where their intervention is needed (e.g. place a doctor in a room left unattended to visit a patient, or a caretaker over a vomit pool to clear it up), as happens in Dungeon Keeper. With no player intervention tasks are completed much more slowly, since in many levels the staff members have to travel from one end of the hospital to another. The player can also advance a patient in a queue for a room or dismiss them, in order to avoid a death in their hospital, which negatively affects the hospital's reputation and reduces the number of end-of-year awards.

Economic management is also important: the player can change the price for the treatment in all the rooms, balancing a low reputation with cheap prices to gain visitors or quickly raising money while maintaining a consistent number of visits due to high reputation. A common tactic is also to place benches and radiators next to one another, in order to make the patients feel too hot and buy expensive drinks from the vending machines.

Playstation Port
There has been a Playstation port which was made by the same team who ported Magic Carpet (also made by Bullfrog). The port is very faithful to the original, but with a smaller resolution (so characters are somewhat squashed). You can save wherever you like, and it takes up 2 blocks.

References to other works
The opposing hospitals in the game are all names of well-known computers from fiction:


 * "Akira" means "Life" in Japanese, and is the name of a powerful psychic in the manga and anime Akira (film)
 * Deep Thought is from Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
 * HAL is from Arthur C. Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey.
 * Holly is the computer in the British sitcom Red Dwarf.
 * Multivac is from a number of Isaac Asimov's works.
 * Zen and Orac are both from the BBC television series Blake's 7.