Codemasters signs Hospital Tycoon for PC

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

Set for a spring 2007 launch, Hospital Tycoon is a medical-themed God game in which players are put in charge of hectic hospital facilities that are constantly on the verge of crisis and collapse. Players are challenged to run, maintain, enhance and expand the hospitals while turning any chaotic situation around using ingenious management techniques.

The most infectious thing about Hospital Tycoon is its humour as players experience how the game's characters - the doctors, nurses and patients -interact with each other and react to how well the player is running each hospital. The game's high level of character interaction will create a living hospital that's part soap opera and part comedy.

A move away from micro-management life-simulation games, Hospital Tycoon will create emerging situations that are as entertaining as they are challenging. The manic medical teams have to deal with patients suffering from the most peculiar ailments, such as the man afflicted with 'Monkey Nuts' and the office worker diagnosed with 'Stress Zombosis', and set about curing them with equally odd treatments.

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. The game is designed for play as either as a sandbox toy, making it accessible to a wider audience, or with structured challenges appealing to core gamers. Whichever way it's played, 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 game's rich visual design will deliver detailed, comedic representations of the patients' bizarre diseases. The more patients that are cured the more your medical empire can grow and flourish, but watch out for the spread of infectious conditions, or you'll soon have an epidemic plunging the hospital into absolute chaos.

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. For the latest on the game, visit the wards online at www.codemasters.com/hospitaltycoon