“So we just tried to take the comical approach. “We were seeing all these really quite horrific things that people go through in their lives and it isn’t easy to turn that into entertainment,” Gary Carr, the artist for Theme Hospital, tells the New Statesman. In fact, despite visiting several British hospitals and even observing surgery in research for their game, its makers decided to inject comedy rather than gritty realism. “A grisly computer game which shows a doctor operating with a chainsaw is to be used as a training aid for NHS managers,” the Evening Standard reported in the month of its release, adding that medical groups had condemned the game. Perhaps it is not surprising then, that Theme Hospital’s initial press diagnosis was deeply serious. Tony Blair had spent the run up to the poll attacking the Tories for mismanagement of the NHS and promising to build hospitals.
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Crammed into the downstairs cupboard of her parents’ – themselves doctors – otherwise large and lovely home, we became the masters of our own hospital, Theme Hospital: a pastel-coloured, retro-patterned, pixelated dolls house in which there were counterproductive numbers of KitKat machines.Ĭonceived in the dying days of John Major’s Conservative government, Theme Hospital was released on PC in 1997 – the same year as New Labour’s election landslide. As Edinburgh’s doctors dealt with rising obesity and a heroin epidemic, across the city my friend and I were taking on our own medical emergencies: bloated heads and elongated tongues.
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