Codemasters signs Hospital Tycoon

Giving everyone the chance to play 'doctors and nurses', Codemasters today announces signing Hospital Tycoon, an original title from development studio Deep Red Games (Monopoly Tycoon, Vega$: Make It Big!, Tycoon City: New York).

Hospital Tycoon is a medical-themed 'God' game that's full of dramas and crazy diseases. Designed for a wide-reaching PC audience, the title is set to launch in spring 2007.

In Hospital Tycoon players will run, maintain, enhance and expand a series of chaotic hospital facilities. A move away from micro-management life-simulation games, Hospital Tycoon's focus and entertainment value will be in experiencing how its characters - the doctors, nurses and patients - interact with each other and react to how the player runs a hospital.

Each hospital is staffed by manic medical teams and packed with patients suffering from the most peculiar diseases - such as the man afflicted with 'Monkey Nuts' or the office worker diagnosed with Stress Zombosis - who need curing with equally bizarre treatments. Delivering emergent and entertaining situations, the game's high level of character interaction is set to create a living hospital soap opera played out with loads of humour.

Says Steve Beverley, Project Leader at Deep Red Games:

"Hospital Tycoon promises to be great fun, and continues Deep Red's drive to fuse the established core gameplay of our previous Tycoon games with richer and deeper character simulation.

"With Hospital we've added a generous helping of widely-appealing humour and a kind of soap-opera format too - think 'Scrubs' meets 'Carry On Matron' and you should get the idea. The game is designed to be played either as a sandbox toy, making it accessible to a mass-market audience, or with structured challenges appealing to core gamers, so there should be something for everyone. It'll be accessible, funny, visually gorgeous, and offer depth for those that want to dig for it."

Players will direct the hospital's medical staff, ensure patients are cared for and have the treatment facilities required. There's also the upkeep of each hospital to control and develop; dedicated areas can be built to support additional medical needs - surgery, diagnosis, physiotherapy and more. Get it right and your patients will go home happy, get it wrong and armies of angry, sick people will make your life hell.

The more patients that come to the hospital and are cured, the more your medical empire can grow and flourish. You'll need to keep your facilities up to date with upgrades and all of the flashier equipment today's pushy patients demands.

The game's rich visual design will deliver detailed, comedic representations of the patients' bizarre diseases and the equally strange treatments you'll need to administer. Watch out too for the spread of infectious conditions, or you'll soon have an epidemic on your hands.

Giving players the chance to play their part in a modern medical drama (and prevent it turning into a crisis), Hospital Tycoon is now in development, exclusively for PC, and scheduled for spring 2007.