If you never played this simulator game back in the 90s then you surely missed out. The basic premise is that you’re running a hospital. You build walls, stick in different rooms and allocate them different functions (diagnostics, treatment etc), hire staff and design the building to include seating (important), toilets (very important) and an array of vending machines to keep everyone happy. It’s best to design the hospital for a quick in’n’out for patients, to save the staff time. 
People are points, the more you get through the door and the more you cure, the more money you make and the closer you are to levelling up. Once you’ve got your reception area set up patients start flooding in. They have bizarre conditions such as Bloaty Headedness (an abnormally large head that requires surgical deflating), Slack Tongue (requiring stretching and cutting) and a range of wonderful psychiatric conditions including the King Complex where sufferers believe they are Elvis. Sometimes you have no idea what to do with them so you can chance an experimental cure or throw them out before they make the hospital look bad.
An advantage the game has over real life is that you can tell people’s mood and how sick they are just by looking at them, which is great as people give you some warning before they complain/die. Waiting lists are easily manipulated by dragging and dropping people in the queue. If something important happens for some reasons people use a fax to tell you.
You’re always trying to turn a profit and compete with the glossy rival hospital. Research improves your treatments but it’s expensive. Inspectors and important people turn up out of the blue, causing everyone to panic. Usually you can fool them by building walls to hide the worst bits of the hospital and making the place look nice with some pot plants. It’s best to chuck patients out if they’re looking likely to die on the premises as that isn’t good for the hospital’s reputation or staff’s morale.
You get applications for staff and get to pick between the more expensive and the more…. professionally dubious. When staff complain you can give them more money or fire them. It’s a good idea to take care of them so they work better, but that takes up time, money and valuable space. Back to work!
If you do well you’re quickly poached by a rival hospital. If you do badly, the corridors are overflowing with sick people, bodily fluids and rats and all the staff are miserable. Maybe you should cut your losses and just start a new hospital.
Sound familiar?
For reasons I cannot understand they never produced an update of this game. You can download the original here, it’s pretty low-tech by current standards. My computer’s actually too new to play it now.
Luckily for me I work in healthcare so the game never really ended. Now where’s my head-deflater….
Dream Electric 