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Surgeon Simulator (formerly Surgeon Simulator 2013) is the full version of the prototype of the same name. The game is a comical take on performing organ-replacement surgery from a first-person perspective. Surgeon Simulator does not attempt to take a realistic medical approach, in part due to the nature of the controls.

The game was originally called "Surgeon Simulator 2013," and the full version was released initially on Steam on April 19th, 2013 for Microsoft Windows, OS X, and Linux. It was renamed to "Surgeon Simulator" on August 14, 2014, when the Anniversary Edition was released.

The sequel, Surgeon Simulator 2, was announced at The Game Awards 2019.

Gameplay[]

The player takes control of Nigel Burke, who must "help" a patient named Bob by transplanting healthy organs into his body.

A signature aspect of Surgeon Simulator is its unique and challenging controls. Players control the surgeon's hand motion with the mouse and bend fingers with the keyboard. The difficulty in performing precise movements often leads to humorous accidents, such as dropping the patient's heart out the back of an ambulance or getting a bone-saw stuck under the patient's intestines.

To make completing the game more manageable, Surgeon Simulator is not medically realistic. Players are free to remove and discard any organ they can reach, and are only required to replace the organ being transplanted. The replacement organ does not need to be sewn into place, but merely dropped in roughly the right location in the chest cavity.

The player is free to use and misuse medical tools. For example, shattering the ribs with a hammer or cutting the intestines with a bone saw.

An operation can be failed by allowing the patient to bleed out, or dropping the replacement organ somewhere where it can't be reached (although the game will not notify you of failure in the latter case). Patients will start to bleed as incisions are made, with bleeding occurring much faster when cutting in the wrong place. Many operations contain a hypodermic green needle that can be used to slow and stop the blood flow, paired with a blue needle that will do the opposite.

Operations[]

There are three standard operations, five in the A&E update. They are the heart, double kidney, brain, eye, and teeth transplants. As well as this, each operation has 4 locations they can take place in.

The first location is a regular operation theatre, with no environmental hazards.

The second location is the hospital corridor, where tools end up on carts arrive and depart on a ~15 second cycle. The patient will occasionally slam through doors while moving through the hospital, which only shakes the camera. Sometimes, the corridors will lead outside, rolling on a pavement on a rainy night. Apart from making things harder to see, this area is no different from the regular corridors.

The third location is the back of a moving ambulance. The ambulance will bounce and make turns while driving, causing the player's medical tools and any loose organs to scatter around, usually hurting Bob. Sometimes the rear door will open, and any loose or thrown items or organs may fall out the back of the ambulance.

The fourth location is space. the player's tools start out scattered around the operating "theatre", floating in zero gravity. This mode can be especially challenging since any object that gets put in motion may bounce around the room, hitting other objects and sending them all flying, usually into Bob. Objects can float above the player's reach, forcing the player to wait and hope they come down or try to throw other objects to bounce them back into range.

Development[]

An initial version of Surgeon Simulator 2013 was created for the Global Game Jam[1] in which the team had 48 hours to make a game with a specific theme. The theme for Global Game Jam 2013 was announced via a video in which a human heart could be heard, the theme was the 'sound of a heartbeat'.[2] Global Game Jam participants were also given a list diversifiers, a free-for-all voluntary list of secondary constraints which would help diversify the entries in the worldwide challenge.[3] The team chose a single diversifier: I’m Board: Make a game that is inspired by, but not a simulation of, a popular board game. The Global Game Jam version can be downloaded from the Global Game Jam website.

Regarding the unusual control scheme, the team found that any other control scheme that it experimented with, including more traditional layouts, simply didn't feel right. The team initially wanted to assign a key to each finger, but soon realized the player would be unable to move their hands around or pick stuff up and instead only mapped one hand to the keyboard, and used the mouse to move around.

The developers were initially unsure of whether or not the game was "genuinely" funny. Although they found themselves laughing they were not sure if it was the game or their sleep deprivation causing it. It was only when they finally presented the prototype to the audience that they realized the comic potential.

The released game is a full version of the original Global Game Jam title and took less than three months to put together. "The decision to make it our next game actually came after the huge response on the internet," said Bossa Studios designer Luke Williams. He believes that creating a game that is just as fun to fail at and to watch is key to drumming up huge support online. "YouTube is the reason the game is where it is," he reasons, although he adds, "We were never aiming for the game to do really well in videos." Williams believes that part of the appeal of watching Surgeon Simulator videos is that non-gamers can easily understand the absurdity of the game, and can treat is as a video in its own right, rather than a video of a game.[4]

The game soundtrack is composed by Black Heron, and is included in the game as MP3 files with A&E. The soundtrack is structured around having 5 main themes for the 5 theatre operations, with the other locations having different variations. The ambulance versions are more hectic, the corridor versions are more rock-based, and the space versions are more melancholic and depressing. The soundtrack listing is as follows:

  1. Take a Number
  2. Surgeon Stimulator (Operating Theatre)
  3. Brain Storm (Operating Theatre)
  4. Are you Kidney-ing Me (Operating Theatre)
  5. Surgeon Stimulator (Ambulance)
  6. Brain Storm (Ambulance)
  7. Are you Kidney-ing me (Ambulance)
  8. Flatline
  9. Brain Dead (Space)
  10. Urine Trouble (Space)
  11. ???
  12. Unidentified Flying Organ
  13. The Tooth Hurts (Operating Theatre)
  14. Eye Doctor Now (Operating Theater)
  15. Surgeon Stimulator (Corridor)
  16. Are you Kidney-ing Me (Corridor)
  17. The Tooth Hurts (Corridor)
  18. Eye Doctor Now (Corridor)
  19. Brain Storm (Corridor)
  20. Eye Doctor Now (Ambulance)
  21. The Tooth Hurts (Ambulance)
  22. The Tooth Hurts (Space)
  23. Eye Doctor Now (Space)

Alternatively, the soundtrack can be purchased on Black Heron's Bandcamp.

Gallery[]

References[]

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