Alexandru Duta

Spitalul is a total conversion mod for Serious Sam that was never completed. The protagonist is Dan Pistol, a patient in a mental ward that wakes up, charges the nurse on duty, and begins a daring escape from the hospital. The basis of the hospital was the local County Hospital. During a span of ten levels, the player was supposed to overpower guards, sneak and use diversionary tactics as well as choreographed shoot-outs to make his way from the top floor down to street level, whereupon he was to be gunned down by armed police waiting for him to exit, thus ending the game. Spitalul inadvertently became a part of a national TV news story in Romania that denounced the game as being too violent and badly portraying the decaying state of state-run hospitals in Romania. The new-found fame did make for a marketing boom for Spitalul and as such its development became accelerated at the time. However, the difficulty of making a mod for Serious Sam proved to overwhelm the team and as such, work on Spitalul was subsequently dropped.

At the time of its abandonment, somewhere in late 2002 to early 2003, there had been 25 beta-testers signed-up as QA. They were selected following a sign-up form on the games’ website, on the criteria of their PC systems. There were 97 total entries.

The mod can be made to work with Serious Sam: The First Encounter and/or Serious Sam: The Second Encounter. It needs the Serious Engine 1, updated to version 1.5. The final engine version 1.10 is now open source and can be found on GitHub.

You can download the final version of the mod.

Spitalul-Mod.zip — .ZIP file, 106 MB

Disclaimer: This is not a finished game. It does not come with an executable file. It needs tinkering with the Serious Engine and a working version of Serious Sam (The Second Encounter is recommended. NOT the HD Remastered edition) to get it to work.

The official game soundtrack is still available. You can listen to it here.




There were a number of promotional videos released. A teaser trailer, that was then cut and released in three versions (one 30 second spot, one 60 second spot and an extended edition) which featured no in-game footage. A development trailer that showcased actual in-game footage of a beta-tester running around the first level. The footage was not captured directly, but was shot with a video camera pointed at a CRT screen. The quality is severely lacking.
 
This is the teaser trailer cut into a 30 second spot.


 
This is the teaser trailer cut into a 60 second spot.


 
This is the extended version of the teaser trailer.


 
This is the development trailer that showcased actual in-game footage.