Somewhere in the 90's, Bullfrog was getting really famous for their installment Theme Park, although this particular franchise kept moving on, there was one that was intermittently lost, it added the first management game focusing on a hospital.
The game was very fun for its time, the objective of each level was to prosper, build your reputation high, keep your patients alive and cash in on them as much as possible, much like Theme Park if you actually see it. Theme Hospital also relied on micromanaging, which puts you in charge of how quick you want your doctors to do their tasks by arranging the furniture into key places and moving the staff quickly from one place to the other.
Reputation was key for you to get costumers, the more reputation the bigger the flow of patients would enter your hospital, the lower reputation however you needed to either lower prices or just redo the map again (which was sometimes quicker).
There was a network game, in the last official EA patch which had the support of three network methods: Serial Cable, Modem and IPX/SPX. The objective of the multiplayer was the same as a single player but all the hospitals (or just 2) were played by humans instead of the Computer AI, and for those who are versed in the dark arts of Hamachi and DosBox you can still play if its worth the trouble.
The game was released in 1997 and its 2012 so in its 15 years, it was never completely neglected as in 1998 there was a port for the Playstation 1 and then after almost 10 years, in 2008, a group of people created the OpenTH project, an open source clone of Theme Hospital but for what I found out, either they changed the name or they stopped developing the game. In 2011 their blog and forums were down, and now its linked to CorsixTH.
Although we can classify this as Abandonware, Playstation didn't thought so, and in 2008 (PAL) and 2010 (US) respectively it was released in the Playstation Network Store. Now this was a port from the old PS1 version and so it was very lacking in terms of sounds, image quality but also changed the specifications of some room requirements and other small tweaks and improvements.
Despite PSN releasing what is already states as a poor port, in 2009, a new project arose with the name of CorsixTH, which is licensed under the MIT Licence and is by far the quickest project of the two to get so fast in obtaining almost all the functions in the game at already a Beta 8 Version, which was released in September 24th, 2011. The clone also adds new features like, an higher resolution obviously, all the toolbars are movable , and other improvements which are shown on the changelog HERE.
CorsixTH is available for all the Operating Systems, this means not only Linux and Windows but also Mac and all of its 32/64 bit counterparts. Its definitely worth a check since its free and you could boost the community. This game like RTTR, needs Theme Hospital files so either bring out that old CD of yours or check any abandoware website for the files.
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