Our own Florence Ion spent the weekend at the San Francisco Global Game Jam and is busily writing about her experience, but we couldn't resist a quick write-up of one of the games that emerged: Surgeon Simulator 2013, by Bossa Studios.
The game puts the player in the role of a surgeon operating on Bob, who has fallen off his toilet and now requires a heart transplant. The player is positioned above the hapless, draped form of Bob and must manipulate surgical tools and instruments to perform the operation.
The gameplay video above is quite possibly the greatest seven minutes of footage I have ever watched in any medium in all of my 34 years, and it proceeds exactly as one might expect. The narrator's calm voice belies the ridiculousness that unfolds as he flops and flails his way through surgery on poor Bob.
"Oh no, look at that," says the narrator nonchalantly, after spilling an entire container of instruments into Bob's open chest cavity. "This is a minor setback. We all know a real doctor never gives up, no matter the cost."
The surgeon proceeds to remove Bob's lungs and ribcage because, hey, they're in the way. "Oh shit," he comments at one point, "his heart has stopped! Bob is having a cardiac arrest!"
Eventually, the heart is removed and waved in Bob's face. "Look at this tiny heart," taunts the surgeon, exactly as happens in real life when the surgeon feels your organs don't measure up.
Finally, it is time to add the new heart—"The heart of a baboon!" the surgeon proudly exclaims—but first he must replace Bob's lungs. He manages to get one back into Bob's chest cavity but fails to replace the second. "He will only have one lung," notes the surgeon. "Don't worry. I got this."
The new heart is gently placed in Bob's shattered cavity, after a bit more fiddling with the single lung, and the game quickly ends with a huge congratulatory message.
The game is available for Windows, OS X, and Linux. I'm going to go download it right now and then I, too, will be fully qualified to perform surgery. The video has convinced me that I don't have to let anything stand between me and my dreams.
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