[Throughout this project, I will be handing over this space to the viewpoints of others for guest posts. Like Beneath a Steel Sky, this one is by my brother Martin]
Theme Park opens with a video in which a Willy Wonka-looking figure emerges from a television and transports a family to the titular park. Bullfrog were presumably aiming for whimsical delight, but the awful ‘90s CGI means it lands squarely in the deepest troughs of whatever the uncanny valley equivalent for things which look nothing like things is, and hits horrifying instead. In that regard, it is a deeply appropriate introduction to the game of Theme Park, which appears on the surface to be a game about running an amusement park in order to make simulated people happy, but underneath, has something considerably darker going on.
So, you build your park, put in some rides, put in a few stalls selling food and drink, hire some staff to keep everything running, set your prices and then, hey presto, it’s time to stage a grand opening and cut a ribbon with a pair of comically large scissors. Or, you know, click the button that says ‘open park’. But the devil is very much in the detail – when you build a burger joint, you can, for example, set an attractively low price point, then jack up the salt content of the fries in order to make your customers thirsty and charge absurdly inflated prices at the drinks stall next door. And that’s just one of the many varied and inventive ways that Theme Park encourages you to shaft your guests. Coconut shies and ring toss games where the punter has no chance of actually winning the prizes on offer, charging money to use the toilets, you name it.
In short, it’s a brutal satire of sociopathic capitalism in which profit is the only thing that matters, and the enjoyment and even safety of your customers is only important insofar as they might negatively impact on profit. Which, let’s be honest, probably makes it an accurate simulation of the real experience of owning a theme park. I mean, is there a greater symbol of the excesses of capitalism than the rollercoaster? Millions of pounds and hundreds of hours spent on gigantic mechanical structures, carefully engineered to produce a one minute adrenaline hit. It’s patently absurd. And yet, despite being well aware of all of this, I still take trips to Thorpe Park or Alton Towers or wherever every couple of years. Because it’s all very well decrying them as monuments to an evil and corrupt system, but frankly it’s basically impossible to live in such a system without being in some way responsible for it, and anyway, rollercoasters are fun.
Theme Park turned out to be the first in a trilogy of simulation games by Bullfrog on this theme. It continued with Theme Hospital, which has you micromanage a (presumably American) hospital emphasizing profit over the health of your patients, then reached a logical conclusion with Dungeon Keeper, which drops the cunning disguises and just openly puts you in charge of Hell itself. Brilliant.
PC CD-ROM chart, Edge 013, October 1994