Like any ecosystem, you still have to keep the tower in balance, but it’s about smaller-scale issues. Rather than dealing with large infrastructure problems, people might complain that their neighbors are too loud, that the elevators don’t run fast enough, or that their parking space is inconvenient. When the sun rises, businesses open, and when it sets, everyone goes home. SimTower, meanwhile, goes one day at a time. Something like Maxis’s SimEarth looks at the world at a macro level, measuring time in hundreds of years and watching the evolution of life. Where SimTower really excels is the down-to-earth scope of the game. After all, there’s a limit to how tall you can make a building. A final goal like that is relatively new for a Maxis game, and it helps focus the progression of SimTower. Unlike SimCity, your skyscraper has an end point, the 100th floor, where you can cap off the tower by building a cathedral. You’re tasked with building a skyscraper through its various phases of development, gradually unlocking new property types as the size of your building increases. Like other Maxis “software toys,” you start out with an open dirt lot. With SimTower, you can feel how his collaboration with Mxais influenced the tone of the series. Not only was it his first game, but it was also the start of the Tower series, which he’d continue years later on other platforms. Saito is best known for his unconventional games, especially Seaman and Odama, two games controlled with microphones, but SimTower has an even bigger place in his caree. His take on the Sim series is more intimate, working at a more human scale, and that makes it one of the strongest entries in the series. The big surprise is that Saito does the Sim formula better than Maxis did. It might come as a surprise that Maxis published another developer’s personal curiosity as part of their Sim series, but it fits in the tradition of Maxis games taking a real world concept, like urban planning in SimCity and blowing it up into a game. That elevator simulation became Yoot Saito’s first game, SimTower: The Vertical Empire. “levator movements, like the steps of a dance, are almost impossible to describe it mere words,” he said. It was more complex than he ever imagined. So with the help from programmer Takumi Abe, he designed a simulation to see how elevators operate in a crowded building. When he called an elevator company to ask, they declined to give him an answer. Saito had a background in architecture, and one day, he found himself fascinated by how elevators work – how they decide which floors to go to and who’s responsible for making them efficient. The manual for SimTower shares a funny story about how Japanese developer Yoot Saito ended up making a Sim game.
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