REINSTALL
Checking back into Bullfrog’s management sim.
Theme Hospital has been through several stages of life. At launch in 1997 it was a big deal, the successor to Theme Park— the game that made Bullfrog’s fortune. Theme Park was an irreverent, colorful management simulator that turned the Guildford studio from a domestic player to an international contender. Theme Hospital adopted Theme Park’s tone—and great swathes of its code—and turned it to a different purpose: The running of a profit-driven British hospital where patients suffer from a variety of comedic, and fictitious, diseases. It was softly irreverent in a way that drew flack from government and the press at the time, but would entirely pass under the radar now.
Then Theme Hospital found a second life as a bargain-bin perennial throughout the low years of the early ’00s. Visit any game shop (remember those?), and there it would be, in a number of different budget imprints. Millions have likely played it. It is kid-friendly but cheeky, lightly strategic but chiefly about having fun with your hospital, its beleaguered staff, and its comedy gadgets. It would run on your parents’ PC. It has been worth a fiver for about 15 years and is still worth a fiver today.
Gag order
Indeed, it costs about that to pull Theme Hospital down from GOG complete with a DOSBox launcher that bypasses the Windows compatibility issues that plague a lot of games from this era. Brutal but necessary fullscreening of its 640x480 native resolution aside, the process of running Theme Hospital on a modern PC is relatively painless.
The flashy-for-the-time opening cutscene is a statement of intent. A helicopter arrives to rush a middleaged superstar doctor—who is in the middle of a game of Dungeon Keeper— to his patient. He bursts dramatically through hospital doors, crushing a nurse. He begins to rev his medical chainsaw, but the patient fails his credit check: a button is pushed and a trapdoor opens. The patient falls into darkness, screams, and the game starts.
It’s tempting to try and unpick the politics here but, if anything, Bullfrog was eager to avoid being seen to undermine the practice of running a hospital. Theme Hospital is too British to read as a sendup of the US healthcare system, and too playful to come across as a critique of the management of the NHS. Instead,