In 2005, a very inevitable-feeling game was released. In fact, it’s remarkable it was as late as that year that we first saw a video game based on the massive television hospital drama ER. The 1994 show that launched George Clooney’s career (if you don’t count Roseanne) had already lost the actor to Hollywood, and by 2005 was very much waning (down from a peak of 36 million viewers to 17.5m), albeit still four years from its eventual demise. Yet, honestly, there was no point in the show’s lifetime when ER: The Game would have made a lick of sense. It remains one of the weirdest video games ever made. Let’s celebrate that.
(To get this out of the way, when I say “20 years since,” this isn’t an exact measure. The game came out in the U.S. in May of 2005, but here in the UK it didn’t appear until September.)
ER, the TV show, certainly had a sense of humor, but it’s fair to say that it was very firmly a drama. These doctors were dealing with life and death, as well as lots of kissing, and there was that time Quentin Tarantino directed an episode. If you wanted silliness, you needed to change channels and watch the extraordinarily weird rival hospital drama Chicago Hope. So it remains a massive mystery how the video game incarnation of the series played like a spiritual sequel to Bullfrog’s Theme Hospital. This was a game in which you had to deal with an invasion of ninjas, and perform an operation while fairies danced around you and a football player kept appearing and disappearing at the foot of the bed.
OK, let’s give this a bit of context. In 2004, EA’s The Sims 2 had released, and controlling characters from an isometric view was big business. ER: The Game very much mimicked the look of the Sims sequel, with its cut-off view of walled rooms and NPC characters roaming around the corridors. And like in The Sims, you had to control your character to perform a series of tasks within strict time limits while maintaining their hygiene, health, and relationships. It’s just, you had to do all this while being an intern in the Chicago hospital, surrounded by the characters from the show. And I really do mean the characters from the show. Completely improbably, frankly inexplicably, this game almost no one heard of, let alone played, starred proper members of the TV show’s cast as voice actors. Noah Wyle, Sherry Stringfield, Mekhi Phifer, and Yvette Freeman all showed up, despite surely having nothing in their contracts that would have made them do so, voicing the doctors and nurses with whom you needed to get along. Sadly Maura Tierney and Goran Visnjic were no-shows, and obviously Anthony Edwards and George Clooney were long gone, but still.
I’m not an expert in how real hospitals are run, but I’m reasonably sure that it’s not entirely a gift-based economy. Yet this is how ER: The Game pitched things, with your relationship statuses with your colleagues often decided by the presents you’d buy for them and receive from them. Even the patients would give you a present if they were happy with your performance. Along the way, you gained new skills and talents, each boosted by being in the positive company of more talented co-workers, as you treated patients for their broken bones, neurological issues, and toxicology-based troubles. It was the latter that led to the most memorable moments.
It has been 20 years since I played this game, and tragically it’s no longer available to buy. (This is definitely one GOG needs to rescue.) I am delighted to say that I do, however, still have the DVD on which it was released. The only issue is I don’t own a DVD drive, and as such can only show it to my PC, which just stares nostalgically at the shiny plastic. Fortunately, I do have my memories, and a copy of the review I wrote for it back in a 2005 print edition of PC Gamer. Let me quote from it:
“It’s certainly the best rubbish game I’ve played in as long as I can remember.”
It’s remarkable how far the incompetently-made game’s utter weirdness carried it, the sheer charm of its absurdity making it a compelling play. And never more so than in that scene when my character started seeing fairies. It was a great level! Everyone was being so nice to me, and my medical skills were hugely improved. Even Dr. Pratt (Phifer) has stopped being a complete dick—the dude had taken a real disliking to me, and wouldn’t even talk about the weather when I tried to chat. The fairies dancing around the room did make the situation somewhat suspect, and like I said, there was that footballer in his full kit who would appear and disappear. That didn’t seem quite right. But it was still a disappointment when I woke up in a bed with Dr. Carter (Wyle) shouting at me. At this point, back in reality, the hospital had been invaded by a ninja and I was needed to help find him on the security cameras. One shift later I was kissing Dr. Carter.
It’s a shame it was so badly made. The controls were a shambles, various systems made little to no sense, and the act of having a conversation with a janitor was technically more complicated than performing surgery on a child. But 20 years later, that shit only makes me like it even more. And it certainly helped that as busted as it might have been, the game was so bonkers that literally anything could happen, including a sudden mad rush of patients in cosplay after a disaster occurred at a sci-fi convention.
Thank goodness for YouTubers, because you can still see the first 15 minutes of the game, complete with its utter lack of NPC pathfinding:
It’s sad that as an industry we appear to be long past crappy TV tie-in games. Who can forget (no matter how hard they try) Telltale’s abysmal CSI games? Or Deadliest Catch: Alaskan Storm? Let alone Prison Break: The Conspiracy. And no, Netflix churning out mobile games for each new commission doesn’t count. We need more terrible games based on big-name franchises, or what’s even the point?
Meanwhile, I’m beginning my campaign for GOG to rescue ER from obscurity, so I don’t have to be the only person who even remembers it.
