In January of 1995, Electronic Arts bought the prestigious British games studio Bullfrog Productions for an undisclosed sum that was rumored to be in the neighborhood of $45 million. The lives of the 35 or so people who worked at Bullfrog were transformed overnight. Peter Molyneux, the man who had build the studio’s reputation on the back of his “god game” Populous six years earlier, woke up the morning after the contract was signed with real money to spend for the first time in his life. For him and his colleagues, the new situation was gratifying, but also vaguely unsettling.
The acquisition came with all of the expected rhetoric from EA about “letting Bullfrog be Bullfrog.” Inevitably, though, the nature of the studio’s output changed in the years that followed. EA believed — and not without evidence — that series and brands were the key to long-term, sustainable success in the games industry. So, it encouraged or pressured the folks at Bullfrog to connect what they were doing now with what they had done before, via titles like Magic Carpet 2, Syndicate Wars, Populous: The Beginning, and Theme Park World. Iteration, in other words, became at least as prized as the spirit of innovation for which Bullfrog had always been celebrated.
And where the spirit of innovation refused to die, you could always do some hammering to make things fit. The most amusing example of this is one of the two best remembered and most beloved games to come out of this latter period of Bullfrog’s existence. What on earth could be meant by a “theme hospital?” EA couldn’t have told you any more than anyone else, but the name sounded pretty good to it when one considered how many copies Theme Park had sold the year before the acquisition.
Theme Hospital was born as one of about a dozen ideas that Peter Molyneux wrote on a blackboard during the heady days just after the acquisition, when Bullfrog had a mandate to expand quickly and to make more games than ever before. This meant that some of the Bullfrog old guard got the chance to move into new roles that included more creative responsibility. Programmer Mark Webley, who had been doing ports for the studio for a few years by that point, thought that Molyneux’s idea of a simulation of life at a hospital had a lot of potential. He plucked it off the list and got himself placed in charge of it.
In the beginning, he approached his brief with a measure of sobriety, not a quality for which Bullfrog was overly known. He even thought to do some field research at a real hospital. He and visual artist Gary Carr, the second person assigned to the team, talked the authorities at Royal Surrey County Hospital, conveniently located right next door to Bullfrog’s offices in Guildford, England, into giving them a behind-the-scenes tour. It proved rather more than the pair had bargained for. Videogame violence, which Bullfrog wasn’t noted for shying away from, was one thing, but this was something else entirely. The two young men were thrown out of at least one operating theater for retching. “I remember we watched a spinal operation one morning, which was bad enough,” says Carr. “Then the person who had been assigned as our guide said, ‘Alright, after lunch we can pop down to the morgue.'” It was right about then that they decided that an earnest simulation of life (and death) at a National Health Service hospital might not be the right way to go. They decided to Bullfrog the design up — to make it silly and irreverent, in Bullfrog’s trademark laddish, blackly humorous sort of way. “It’s not about how a hospital runs,” said Mark Webley sagely. “It is about how people think [it] runs.”
Webley played for a while with the possibility of making Theme Hospital a sort of satirical history of medicine, from the Middle Ages (“when curing people usually meant hacking their legs off with a bloody great saw, covered in leaches”), through the Victorian Age (“lots of mucking about with electric shocks and the like”), and on to the present and maybe even the future. In the end, though, that concept was judged too ambitious, so Theme Hospital returned to the here and now.
That said, the longer the slowly growing team worked, the less their game seemed to have to do with the real world of medicine that could be visited just next door. A former games journalist named James Leach came up with a matrix of absurd maladies: Bloaty Head (caused by dirty rainwater and putrid cheeses), Broken Wind (caused by too much exercise after a big meal), Slack Tongue (caused by too much vapid celebrity gossip), Infectious Laughter (caused by hearing too many sitcom laugh tracks), King Complex (afflicting Elvis impersonators who spend too much time in character). The cures are as imaginative as the diseases, generally involving slicing and dicing the patients/victims with one or more horrifying-looking Rube Goldberg contraptions. Theme Hospital is healthcare as those with a deadly fear of doctors imagine it to be.
The finished game is deceptively complex — perhaps a little too much so in my opinion. You start each scenario of the campaign with nothing more than a plot of land and a sum of starting money that never seems to be enough. You have to build your hospital from scratch, deciding where to place each and every room, and then where to put everything that goes inside each room, from the reception desk to the toilets to the even more important soda and candy machines. (This is most definitely not socialized medicine: your hospital is expected to make a profit.) Then you have to hire doctors, nurses, janitors, and administrative personnel from a wide variety of applicants. Figuring out how best to fiddle the countless knobs that affect the simulation requires considerable dedication; every input you make seems to result in a cascade of advertent and inadvertent consequences. Once the action really starts to heat up, Theme Hospital can become as frenzied as any session of Quake or Starcraft. Keeping the pot from boiling over in the midst of an epidemic or a disaster — events that become more and more frequent as you progress further — requires constant manual intervention, no matter how efficiently you’ve laid our your hospital and how judiciously you’ve selected its staff.
Your reaction to all of this will depend on two factors: whether you’re someone who is inherently drawn to open-ended simulations of the SimCity and Theme Park stripe, and whether Bullfrog’s brand of humor causes you to come down with your own case of Infectious Laughter. My answer to both of these questions is a qualified no, which makes Theme Hospital not really a game for me. By the time I’d played through the first couple of scenarios, I could see that the ones to come weren’t going to be all that different, and I just didn’t have the motivation to climb further up the campaign’s rather steep ladder of difficulty. Speaking of which: the campaign is as rudimentary as the simulation is baroque. Each of its scenarios is the same as the one before, only with more: more diseases to cure, more requirements to meet, more pressure. It left me with the same set of complaints I recently aired about the campaign in Rollercoaster Tycoon: I just wish there was a bit more more there there, an attempt to provide a more interesting and diverse set of challenges that entailed less building of the same things over and over from scratch.
... continue reading