Two Point Hospital is the incoming institute management sim from the creators of Theme Hospital. As a long-standing fan of the latter, everything I've seen from the former has so far impressed me—from its cutesy animated art style, to its slapstick Pythonesque humour. With comedy in mind, developer Two Point Studio wanted fictional radio DJ Alan Partridge to host its in-game hospital radio station.
"When we started the project, we thought, wouldn't it be cool to get Alan Partridge to be the hospital radio DJ?" Two Point Studios' co-founder Mark Webley tells our Samuel. "In fact, we took some Mid Morning Matters stuff off the internet, took some lines from his radio show, and put them in between music tracks as a kind of 'this is what it would be like'. And it worked really well. It would've been so cool.
"Unfortunately, he was just too busy with other projects going on. We couldn't get him. So that was the inspiration. Hospital radio: you've got music, a hospital radio DJ. It kind of worked. It's evolved more into a Two Point County radio."
Alan Partridge, for those unaware, is a character played by actor and comedian Steve Coogan—whose CV boasts everything from Despicable Me 2 to The Other Guys, Curb Your Enthusiasm and The Simpsons. As Patridge, the gormless and socially inept radio DJ has starred in shows such as On The Hour, Knowing Me, Knowing You and I'm Alan Partridge.
"When I found out Steve Coogan couldn't do it, I sulked for about two months," adds Webley. "That was the idea in my head, and when it wasn't that, I just didn't want to do a hospital radio DJ. Then the idea of actually making it a bit broader, and our writer and voice actor worked pretty closely with us on developing three different characters. You probably didn't hear all three [in your time with the demo], but different people are going to like different characters. It kind of works, and works better than we imagined it would."
For more Two Point Hospital reading, check out Sam's hands-on impressions here. We also interviewed the devs earlier this year.