This weeks dive into the retro vault take us back to 1994 and SimCity’s shunned little brother, SimTower: The Vertical Empire. The idea of the game is to create a completely self sustaining tower spread over 109 floors, using condos, hotels, offices, shops, restaurants and more. The game itself was not actually made by Maxis like all the other Sim games, but rather it was made by a company called OPeNBooK Co., Ltd in Japan under the name The Tower, Maxis then bought the rights and relabeled it SimTower for a western audience.

The fist thing you notice when playing this game is that unlike modern games, it actually opens up the interface in four separate windows, which can get really annoying at times, really they should have just slapped it all into a sidebar and be done with it. That aside once you are into the game, you will need to start building your tower, and like all good buildings, the ground floor of your tower (and every 15th floor) has to be a lobby and once you have one you are ready to enter the action packed world of tower construction. You start with a 1 star tower rating, meaning you can only build the basic structures, condos, offices, fast food bars and lifts. You improve your star rating by increasing the population of your tower, and with new star ratings come new structures such as shops, hotel rooms, hospitals, security stations, recycling centres, underground parking, cinemas and even a metro station. The actual aim of the game is to reach a five star rating by getting a population of 15,000 and then build a cathedral on floor 100 and hold a wedding ceremony, but as a sim game you have no limits on how long you take to do it.

The game itself is not too difficult, the real art being in effectively setting up your elevators, a standard elevators can only cover 30 floors each, while express elevators can only stop at lobbies, so it’s crucial to get it right or the people will get mad and leave your tower for good. Also you need to keep adequate facilities in your tower to keep the peeps happy, they do not like having to travel 30 floors to go to the hospital for instance, or living in a tower without adequate waste recycling facilities.

Thankfully though, it is quite easy to make money in this game (unlike most sim games), with offices, shops, hotel rooms, cinemas, etc. generating cash for you every morning, while condos just give you a one off boost of about $150,000 when they get occupied. On top of this it is possible for you to be gifted large sums of cash randomly if your builders find a hidden cache of gold while they are building, but of course the coin of fate is two sided, and occasionally something will go wrong, either terrorists planting a bomb in your tower and demanding money or they set it off, or a fire which will cost a cool $250,000 to call out the fire department (robbing swines!).

The biggest downside of this game is how short it is, you can actually complete it, well build a 100 floor, 5 star tower in a few hours, but you cant let that cloud your judgment, this is easily one of the more fun ‘classic’ sim games and it’s incredibly easy to just pick up and play to kill some time.

The game was originally designed for windows 3.1 and 95, but will happily run in XP. And fans of the game may be pleased to know that the game will be re-released in Japan in July for the Nintendo DS under the title ‘The Tower DS’, so hopefully we will get a version in English soon. And like all good games from 15 years ago, SimTower is now abondonware, so can be freely downloaded from here.

Screenshot Gallery

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

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