Theme Hospital

Theme Hospital is a 1997 video game, a tongue-in-cheek Space Management Game that places you in the shoes of a cartoon-hospital manager. Sounds boring? Not with the diseases you're going to be asked to treat!

The game is comprised of ten levels. In each level you will be tasked with some objective, usually financial. Starting out with an empty building, you need to construct walls inside the building to create rooms for diagnosis and treatment of various diseases, and equip them with whatever technology is available to you. Then you set up waiting areas, and the patients start streaming in. The objective is to have the patients go through as many diagnosis procedures as possible, sucking out their hard-earned cash in the process, but you also need to cure them before they get fed up and leave the hospital (lowering your reputation).

Bathrooms and soda machines must be placed down, and patients need somewhere to sit while they wait for the doctor to see them. You also need to hire a staff of doctors, nurses and janitors, and provide them with relaxation areas (and ample salaries). Doctors must be trained in various specialties like psychiatry or surgery. Janitors run around cleaning up vomit and trash, and also need to fix your medical machinery (which is likely to explode if overused). It's very important to make sure not to overspend too early on new machines, as it takes a while to build up a reputation so that more patients will come in to pay for that higher-quality treatment.

The underlying gameplay, as in similar games like Dungeon Keeper and Evil Genius, is space-management. Each mission map is limited in space and usually can't comfortably fit everything, so you need to make sure to skimp on space as much as possible while keeping rooms roomy enough - otherwise everyone (including your employees) will get moody and leave. Narrow corridors and rooms without windows are likely to end up bankrupting you. On some levels you can also spend money to purchase extra adjacent buildings to expand your hospital. Of course, distance between the various facilities is very important: doctors need to reach the bathrooms and rest areas quickly so they can get back to their jobs more often, and patients don't want to spend forever walking the hallways between the various diagnosis and treatment rooms. Not to mention the fact that emergency situations occur often, in which you'll need to provide treatment to a lot of patients within a very short period of time, including the time it takes for them to disembark from a medical helicopter and WALK to the treatment room, and wait in line for the nurse!

The greatest joy in this game comes from the wide variety of bizarre diseases, as well as the in-game documentation about these diseases. For instance, you'll get an awful lot of Elvis Impersonators (a disease known as "King Complex") who are cured by "A Psychiatrist telling the patient how ridiculous they look". There are even crazier diseases like "Hairyitis", "Invisibility" and "Spare Ribs". Some of the treatment rooms you can build are meant to cure a specific disease with some wacky machinery - for instance, "Bloaty Head" (yeah) is cured by popping the patient's head with a needle, and then re-inflating it with a bicycle pump.

The game was based on similar management-themed games like Theme Park (not surprisingly, by the same developer) that were very popular in the mid 90's. However, its success did not come immediately, and was mostly recorded in the long-run: it continued to sell for over a decade! Windows XP compatible versions can still be found in bargain bins world-wide, and can also still be purchased from several on-line vendors. Surprisingly, a sequel was never created.

Tropes used in Theme Hospital include:

Announcer Chatter
Artifact Title: What exactly is a theme hospital?
Black Comedy: The entire game.
Bottomless Bladder: Averted. You have to build toilets for your patients (though not for your employees).
British Accents: The Esturine accent of the Announcer.
Difficulty Spike: Level six, which introduces the aforementioned epidemics.
Dummied Out: One of the diseases was supposed to be "Pregnancy". The manual describes it as being caused by "Power-cuts in urban areas", and displays symptoms of "Faddish eating with consequent beer gut". An unofficial patch hacked it back into the game.
Elvis Impersonator: Patients suffering from King's Syndrome.
Freudian Couch: Used in all psychiatric therapies.
Instant Bandages: Patients with "Fractured Bones" come in already wearing bandages and casts. The treatment is to remove them using a silly machine.
Invisibility: It's a disease. All you see is a person's hat, cane, and shades.
Isometric Projection: Which often detracts from your ability to see things behind walls, a serious annoyance when every little bit of space is so valuable.
Large Ham Announcer: Well, as long as you don't think she's the Most Annoying Sound.
No Fair Cheating: If you enter a cheat code, the Public Address announcer will constantly announce that the Hospital Administrator is cheating.

"Warning! A cheat is running the hospital!"

Product Placement: The vending machines display the KitKat logo, despite vending drinks rather than confectionery.
Punny Name: One of the hospitals is named/takes place at a location named Eggsenham.
Real Time with Pause
Reinventing the Wheel: Your research department will repeatedly rediscover the same diagnosis or treatment rooms in each mission, and you'll start each mission with the "Default" effectiveness of all drugs and machinery. Fortunately, a handful of rooms that must be discovered in early missions become available-by-default in later missions.
Shout-Out: The Horned Reaper can be seen in the intro cutscene with an arrow through the eye. Also, a doctor can be seen playing Dungeon Keeper.
The Shrink: Psychology is one of the three specialties that doctors can have.
Spinning Paper
Stuff Blowing Up: Earthquakes can damage your equipment, and they can explode. When this happens the room is unusable forever - you can't even delete it.
Tongue Trauma: People with swollen tongue have the excess cut by the slicer. Ouch.
Video Game Cruelty Potential: The basis of treatment at your hospital. Most treatments are described as "painful" and look very much so. There's a tongue-slicing machine, an electrocution machine, and the above-mentioned popping of bloated heads, to name a few. And yeah, you're charging a ridiculous amount of money for this treatment. It's a veritable cruelty-potential manifestor for intelligent players.
- If you can't yet diagnose a disease because you lack the necessary technology, you can send the patients to your research department where they will be fed into the "auto-autopsy machine" to speed up your research. Alive.
Vomit Chain Reaction: Expect this often, especially if the hospital is dirty, or the waiting areas are crowded.
Your Head Asplode: The Bloaty Head disease is cured by popping the person's head and reinflating it.