TOM FRANCIS
REGRETS THIS ALREADY

Naming Drugs Honestly In Big Pharma

I’ve been playing Big Pharma, a game where you design production lines to manufacture cures to sell for maximum profit, or to genuinely help people, as your fancy may dictate. It’s excellent and I have become hopelessly addicted to it, but my favourite part is having to come up with names for the often double-edged drugs your imperfect process has produced:

It turns out this one doesn’t even treat angina – darkened effects are deactivated ones.

Soon a company name presented itself:

Eventually we fixed the sleepiness side effect:

Slightly miscalculated this one:

And lastly, what turned out to be the most profitable drug of the decade:

My lab was a mess.

But I was super proud of myself for figuring out a neat way to fit two Cryogenic Condensers in parallel in this small space – they take twice as long to process things, but they’re big and awkward to run dual conveyor belts around:

This was the final layout of my factory. Blue is anxiety meds, brown is bronchitis, red is bipolar, green is strokes. Some of the same coloured lines are different methods of making the same drug, faster or to a better standard depending on how much floor space I had to work with.

The goal was to make $1,000,000, which I did pretty quick, but the ‘Master’ level goal is to make $10,000,000 before the deadline. After the ten years were up, the pink bar here shows how close I was to that:

God damn it.