Theme Park
Mega Cruel game #3
Type of game
Against a backdrop of flashy colors and good intentions, a game that just wants to ruin our confidence, our self-esteem and our very lives.
Release date on our machines
1994 sure. June? No bloody idea. I rather suspect it's a month everyone hates.
Developer
Bullfrog Productions, Ltd. decided to let its human hatred do the talking for this game.
publisher
Electronic Arts, Inc. Maybe it's their fault that Bullfrog was mean.
Theme Park : available at GOG.com. The guys never disappoint.
When my father came to pick me up one weekend a month, we often went visiting good friends of his. Very nice people, including Eddie Chatterton, who owned a Master System! Can you believe it? But I'm not here to talk about this wonderful console today. I'm here to talk about the PC that graced the other end of the lounge. A PC that predates the PCs I've known! Equipped with Windows 3.1, no CD-ROM drive, just a slot for inserting floppy disks. And in that floppy disk collection : Worms! Oh no, I'm not talking about that either. Theme Park! Yes, here it is. A game in which I can build my own... well, theme park, Eddie tells me. Ah well, OK! Looks like I'm going to love this one! Can I try it out while you're having a drink? Thanks, Eddie! While you eat and play board games too? I can't? Oh well, that's okay, I've already lost.
Opening hours: Saturday evening
Fairground Punch
When I think of getting to grips with a management game these days, I see myself being gently guided through the various functions by a well-thought-out tutorial. Back in the 90s, all this was almost non-existent. You had to take matters into your own hands, dropped straight into the lion's den, and just muddle along, clicking buttons and hoping for the best. In Theme Park, at least I had the chance to read French. Except that I didn't understand much more than if it hadn't been translated, given the quantity and diversity of information to be ingested. I was still playing Aladdin on Mega Drive at the time. It doesn't represent the same cerebral investment. As a result, a round of Theme Park may have started out nicely, with the placement of cute attractions and fun little stores, but I was soon falling into a kind of vicious spiral from which I would never emerge.
The truth is, we're totally consumed by staff recruitment, price adjustments for every item in every store, cleaning up garbage, repairing broken appliances, employee salaries, merchandise inventory, research into new technologies, the amount of sugar in ice cream and salt in French fries (I swear, it goes as far as that)... not to mention the competitors buying up our shares, the unions sucking our blood and the poor shareholders we can no longer shower with cash! ALL WITHOUT ANYONE TO EXPLAIN ANYTHING. Now I'm talking like a vile right-wing shark, that's how much this game still disturbs me. So, yes, there is an advisor who posts messages from time to time, but he's mainly used to harp on the fact that we're performing badly without providing any solutions.
-Kid, you're running your park all wrong.
-Uh, sir, I'm nine years old. Could you help me out just a little?
-Get your shit together, we're telling you!
Unsurprisingly, all my games ended in crushing defeats. I was trying to improve, though! By placing asphalt walkways more like this, queues more like that, shifting the bouncy castle a few squares, or selling Coke a little more expensively. It was no use. I was bankrupt in ten minutes. Mind you, it wasn't much better on other titles in the same genre, such as Master of Orion II and Civilization II. There's a big difference between loving management games and mastering them. It took me a long time to grasp the nuance, I think.
The graphics have suffered terribly from the evolution of hardware and technology, but if you squint a little, you can tell that everything is trying to look cute. The VGA cartoon style blends well with the theme park theme. Right, Theme Park. Well, at least the name's well chosen. There's plenty of fun to be had watching visitors get lost in the maze, or bored to death on the children's ride. Buildings, stalls and structures are displayed as ultra-exaggerated caricatures of the trinkets they sell, or the activities they offer. This carefree attitude only applies to the beginning of the game, because when the money runs out, the technicians leave and the attractions start to explode. At the same time, over-salted fries make all the customers vomit, and crooks rob us of what little is left in the till.
​
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Visual Cruelty
The paradisiacal park turns into a carnival of hell, and we end up turning off the computer, crying, just after seeing our avatar (almost) end his life in the defeat cutscene. But if by some miracle you manage to build a large, self-sufficient complex, the result looks really good... at least when you zoom out enough to erase the pixels as much as possible.
What the hell is this?
If the artistic direction has not aged well, then the music has long since been buried! You really have to hang in there to put up with these melodies salvaged from the most pitiful fairs on the planet. It's a good thing the tunes change often, since they're launched according to which attraction is best centered on the screen (well, I think that's how it works). I've really struggled to find the one track I really like in all this. On YouTube, you can find a few things from the Saturn version, or the complete O.S.T. on Mega Drive and Super NES, but all in one block. I can't even remember how I managed to upload the MIDI title below; no doubt by skimming a few obscure sites, and fiddling with several online programs. No one seemed to have the courage to release the entire album of the PC version on the Internet. Or more likely, there's no one in the world cruel enough to share all those tracks. Imagine the number of people who could have paid the price, but whose health wasn't destroyed thanks to them! Russell Shaw, you know I adore you thanks to your sick work on Dungeon Keeper. But seriously, on Theme Park, you destroyed my ears several times. Well, I admit that in the end, nothing but these hellish compositions could have better accompanied my pathetic parks. Even more so when the music was going off as a warning that a ride was about to implode. That made me laugh. And to be fair (nope, no joke there), I really like the one playing for the tree house. The version I found comes from a sound card that's even more blown up than the one I had, but if I'm going to nitpick over details like that, I might as well put myself in a mental institute right now.
Same fare for everyone
On this famous evening of discovery, the adults are eating and drinking, the younger children are dozing in front of the TV, with a brand-new Lion King VHS running in the VCR. And I'm... well, I've had my third defeat at Theme Park in less than an hour. I can see that the parents are starting to mock me gently, perhaps with the help of alcohol. So I ask Eddie to take my place to study his strategy, in order to make a little progress. Everyone comes to admire his skills, which turn out to be only barely better than mine. After ten minutes, he leaves his chair with his head down while everyone laughs at him.
A few months later, I managed to get hold of a copy of the game - maybe Eddie's, I can't remember. Comfortably seated in front of my father-in-law's computer, I thought I'd finally be able to unlock Theme Park's secrets. But an underpaid mechanic decided otherwise. Despite arriving at the site of the snake slide to be repaired, he quietly chewed his sandwich while staring intently at me. I swear he knew I was on the other side of the screen, shamelessly underpaying him. He hated me, and let me know it by letting the attraction explode. I had dead people on my conscience, he didn't, and I went bankrupt two minutes later. Come on kid, go to bed after this, and go nodding without flinching when your mother wishes you sweet dreams.