Remembering classic games: Emergency Call Ambulance (1999)

There aren’t many driving game experiences you’d class as ‘horror’. The closest most people get is trying to drive a night race at the Nürburgring Nordschleife in Gran Turismo. But that’s because most people haven’t played Sega’s seemingly innocuous arcade game Emergency Call Ambulance.

Emergency Call Ambulance is, on the face of it, a perfectly innocent prospect. It casts you as a Chicago ambulance driver, delivering patients to the hospital as quickly as possible. It’s a lot like Crazy Taxi, only it would be totally inappropriate to be playing blaring punk music at a time like this.

It’s not until you actually start the game that the true implications of this premise sink in. The opening cutscene shows a spectacular car crash and a 10-year-old boy being dragged out of the wreckage by the family dog, which does raise the question of whether there was anyone on the scene more qualified to extract him. Someone with opposable thumbs perhaps?

Then it’s your job to drive, with little Jack in the back, dashing to the hospital and trying to avoid colliding with traffic, which causes his heart rate to spike and his condition to worsen. And with the sole purpose of an arcade game to rinse you of cash, it's likely you'll fail at least once with predictably traumatising results.

It’s frankly astonishing that this game exists at all, let alone in the form of a colourful arcade game. The only explanation we can think of is that it was the late 1990s and everyone was in a Clooney fuelled frenzy over ER. As money spinners go, though, it's effective: you'd better believe we were pumping in pound coins until we got that little lad to hospital. At which point they go and let the dog into the emergency room. Completely unsanitary.