Sim Tower

1994 Maxis Simulation Game whose gameplay is Exactly What It Says on the Tin. The player is put in the role of an owner and chief executive of a massive urban development project in an unnamed city, going through five stages of gameplay, in order to achieve the coveted title of Tower. These stages are:

One Star: Allows access only to the basic facilities, namely lobbies, offices, condominiums, standard elevators, blank floors and stairs.

Two Stars: Achieved with 300 people (be they permanent residents, tenants, hotel customers, or visitors), and grants access to single hotel rooms, housekeeping offices, service elevators and security offices.

Three Stars: Achieved with 1,000 people, and grants access to escalators, express elevators, restaurants, retail shops, movie theatres, party halls, parking ramps, parking spaces, medical centers, recycling centers, double hotel rooms and hotel suites.

Four Stars: Achieved with 5,000 people, a favorable VIP rating, 2 or more hotel suites and the satisfaction of recycling, parking and medical needs. Allows access to the Metro Station.

Five Stars: Achieved with 10,000 people and a Metro Station. Allows access to the Cathedral. In order to achieve Tower status, the Cathedral must be placed on the 100th Floor (the highest floor available) and a wedding held.

Sim Tower was originally developed by Japanese programmer Yoot Saito as simply Tower, independent of Maxis. Saito eventually developed a sequel, Yoot Tower, which was released stateside by Sega.

Confusingly, Tower was re-released for iOS devices, but since EA owns the "Sim" name, it was named Yoot Tower, which was the name of The Tower II.


 * Actually Four Mooks: Inverted; some people sprites display a mother and child, but they're still counted the same as other tenants in population and satisfaction calculations.
 * African Terrorists / Scary Black Man: The terrorist in the image for the terrorist bomb threat event is a Cool Shades-wearing black trenchcoated fellow who looks like he could've wandered in from Nigeria.
 * Aloha Hawaii: In Yoot Tower, the "easy" tower.
 * An Entrepreneur Is You
 * B-Movie / Epic Movie: The two types of film available for screening at the theatre seem to fit into these categories, judging by their parodic titles.
 * Difficulty Spike: The game gets substantially harder at three stars, though to be fair the player's given the most facilities at this level.
 * Friends Rent Control: Averted, by the fact Condominiums are quite pricey in-game and cater to the middle class.
 * It's All Upstairs From Here: A rare non-RPG example. The highest ranking requires a tower to reach to the maximum amount of stories, though it is fully possible to do so in a thin vertical line.
 * No Export for You: While The Tower and The Tower II got brought over as Sim Tower and Yoot Tower respectively, The Tower: Bonus Edition (an enhanced Sim Tower for Play Station) and half a dozen expansion packs from The Tower II / Yoot Tower were never translated.
 * Sinister Subway / Subways Suck: Averted; the Subway is a good facility well worth the enormous investment of $1,000,000, which can be a great boost to your commercial facilities.
 * Spiritual Successor: Tiny Tower.
 * There's No B in Movie: Both played straight and averted, depending on how you play the game. See above.