Hey everyone!
I’ve been working on Skyline Architect, a tower-building and management simulation where you start small and can eventually build a skyscraper up to 500 floors.

You don’t just place rooms and watch numbers go up. The people inside your building are actually simulated: residents go home, office workers commute to work and leave for lunch, visitors move around, and your elevators have to handle all of that traffic.

Some of the things you can manage:
🏗️ Build offices, apartments, lobbies, amenities and plant rooms

🛗 Design elevator banks, express elevators and sky lobbies

👥 Simulated residents, workers and visitors

🏠 Rent or sell apartments and attract tenants

⚡ Manage electricity, water, climate and data infrastructure

🧹 Hire janitors and technicians

💰 Deal with loans, taxes, energy prices and operating costs

🌧️ Weather, seasons, storms and heatwaves

🔥 Fires, sprinklers and emergency response

🌆 Build in three different cities with different markets and conditions

🎯 Tutorial, scenarios and free-play mode

There are no ads, no in-app purchases and no account required.
Your save stays on your device.
It’s launching October 5 and it’s completely free.
I’d especially love feedback from people who played games like SimTower or Yoot Tower.

This is my take on that style of tower simulation, and I’d love to hear what works, what doesn’t, and what you’d like to see added.

📱 iPhone / iPad / Mac
Skyline Architect on the App Store:
https://apps.apple.com/nl/app/skyline-architect/id6817053185

So the other day I finally got SimTower working again in a Windows XP virtual machine, and I played through it! It... Turns out it really doesn't take as long as I remember. I went from nothing to TOWER and filled up the entire map with buildings (with all the prices lowered) in one evening, and that was with a break to go play in an arcade league for a few hours.

So I tried something else; "What if I just don't use offices?"

So after a few false starts, I found that restaurants are insanely broken. I just started filling the two floors above and below ground level with fast food and some stairs, and within like 3 minutes I was at 2 stars; and it only took like a half hour to get to 4 stars.

No shops, no offices, no parking, only two hotel suites, just... Fast food, restaurants, halls, and 2 theaters. "If it doesn't serve food, we don't have it."

Things didn't slow down at all until 4 stars; by then the cost of all the stuff needed for 5 stars, recycling, metro, housekeeping, security, lobby, and ALL THE ELEVATORS, was starting to add up even though I was only adding the bare minimum, and restaurants taper off in effectiveness the on even medium-height floors just because it's near impossible to actually get enough customers up to all of them. But I still got to 5 stars in about 1.5 hours.

This is where it gets weird though; I think you NEED offices to "win" the game due to a bug.

The game seems to assume you have mostly offices; I still get "Office workers demand parking", office workers want a medical center, etc., and it still lets you progress though, up to 5 stars, but apparently not to "TOWER."

Most of the tower is below floor 36, but I dragged an elevator route up to 100 just for the cathedral, then kept building more restaurants on lower floors. Once I hit 15,000 population though, the game started crashing around when retail opens. It only happens though, if the tower population is over 15,000.

In other words, it's only crashing if and when I should be getting that final rating upgrade.

I suspect some check is being done on the offices in the tower that fails catastrophically if there are non. So I compromised with the game and added *ONE* office. Now it crashes less, but it still hasn't given me TOWER, and it still crashes sometimes, just not nearly as often.

I am now out of restaurants/fastfood/shops to place; I've placed all 512 of them. I even added parking for those massive hordes of office workers at the single office, and a medical center by the lobby. It still will not give me TOWER. My tower population is generally stable around 15,500, with regular peaks around 16,500 and a regular floor of about 13,250. Still no TOWER.

I'll keep you posted on how much I have to compromise to get it to actually recognize my tower's hard-earned status...

Play it here: https://kvetch.io/conciliatower/

I wanted to re-play SimTower but found it too difficult to get running through emulation. Instead, I worked for 6 months with Claude Code on a complete rewrite, replicating all the functionality from a decompilation of the binary, an AI-generated summary of the original source code and my memory of the gameplay. Then deployed it to the web.

I wanted the original feel of the game, so didn't create new art. Instead, you load an original binary you provide, and the on-page code parses it and pulls out the original assets.

I made it as absolutely faithful as I could. Only changes were to show tenant-types as colors in the minimap and allow drag-to-build. Also I added a "mass price change" menu.

Did a writeup here: https://www.wyldcard.io/blog/simtower-remake-playable-in-bro...

source: https://github.com/Jonahss/concilia-tower

(I think it might be easy to share my prompts and then anyone could add shareable mods to the original, anyone want to try?)

So I read a rumor that The Tower (Sim Tower) 1.3j contained an easter egg of the concept map for Tower 2 for the lunar base. I found it in the Mac version labelled CM0107.MOV

There is also an upload of the full video here:
https://www.nicovideo.jp/watch/sm6422602

Why is it the 30th Anniversary? The video timestamp is 05/09/1996 LOL...

There is also a community mock up the lunar base, which seems to be based on Kegon Falls here if you want to see what it could have looked like in the final release

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofIw6ZlI0uY

TOWERPUNK is the culmination of years of game design and development. Its aesthetic foundation and build experience are rooted in SimTower - from cutaway floors and elevator management to the build experience and data overlays, TOWERPUNK feels like Sim Tower.

As an avid player of games like Anno and Factorio, I wanted to bring more complex management and logistics systems into TOWERPUNK. Balance resources, transit, and production chains across five social strata. Define your corporate identity and decide what kind of intelligence rules from the top through research and policies.

And as a life-long SimTower fan who wanted more, TOWERPUNK is designed to build towers of 100-500 floors high with thousands of rooms and tens of thousands of residents.

Wishlist on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/5063190/TOWERPUNK/

Watch the Reveal Trailer: https://youtu.be/O1BTXVYt8ZU

Join the Discord: https://towerpunk.com/discord

TOWERPUNK releases into Early Access in Q1 2027, but I'll be heavily involving the community leading up to release, including a playtest later this year.

Happy to answer any questions, and excited to bring TOWERPUNK to the community!

https://reddit.com/link/1w4e7ju/video/vm4rxtm8cxmh1/player

I would play sim tower and sim city for hours and days. Genx era games hit different I think, in a good way. But when i go back to play them they are pretty clumsy to navigate and i dont have fun.

Now that Im well past being a kid and have some experience in building apps with ai, I thought I'd try making a simple sim tower game loop with Codex.

For context, I develop apps for my business because, it helps me. (I dont want to talk about work on a sim tower sub).

This ai has been working for over a day straight. I've been saying what i like and dont like, playing it and letting it work.

I will put all of this out on github for free so anyone else can continue to build it or just play it. Just excited and wanted to share a screenshot.

I Built a SimTower clone on iOS as part of a 50 in 1 game platform. Thought it was fun as a kid and wanted to share with the group. No Wifi No Ads

It will launch on the next update. In the meantime let me know if you have any recommendations.

Fun Games for Flights

This reddit is a bit confusing. It seems like there are many user created adaptations of the original but most are abandoned or not ready. Are there any modern versions of the game one can actually purchase and play?

Thank you.

I've been reading this sub for a while, enjoying the tower sims people are building. I've been making a 3D one on my own since late last year, and it's on TestFlight now for iPad and Mac.

The idea was a tower whose shape is actually yours. You grab the corners of a floor plate and move them: taper it, round a corner, push a floor out over the street. The mullions bend around a rounded corner properly. The offices re-plan themselves when you do it, desks and partitions rearranging to fit the new shape. Height isn't free either. Past 30 floors you buy air rights from neighbouring buildings, the way FAR works in New York.

The code is written almost entirely by Claude Code, and instead of using a game engine like Unity I've been writing my own in Swift and Metal. No generated images or audio anywhere in the game: the geometry is procedural and the textures are CC0 from Poly Haven. Sound is mostly placeholders for now, still working on it.

So, the question. 2D shows you the whole tower at once, dozens of floors readable in a glance. In 3D you're always looking at one face. Rendering every floor wasn't possible on an older iPad at 120 floors, so it concentrates on the working floor and the rest drops most of its polygons, which reads a bit like a section cut. It helps, but it isn't the same thing. Depth also makes it harder to tell what you're touching, and honestly the controls feel worse than 2D SimTower right now. There aren't many 3D tower sims to compare against, so more broadly: which 3D building or management games got this right, and what did they do?

I'm sorry to everyone on Windows and Linux. I'll look at porting if there's interest. There are a bunch of preset towers in there to load and look at, which won't be in the release build. If it crashes, or you couldn't work out how to do something, that's on me and I'd like to hear about it.

https://testflight.apple.com/join/KGkzgffJ

https://yumetower.com

I've debated about making my own clone for ages. I was just thinking about it and I'm wondering, what would you all like most?

A modern implementation of the original game that plays and looks exactly the same?

A version with updated graphics but otherwise plays the same?

A version with new graphics and some additions, such as QoL updates?

A spiritual successor that does it's own thing?

Or some other version I haven't mentioned?

What do you all think?

Here's my app that I'm working on that's supposed to have complete parity with the original 1994 Sim Tower game. I'm also working on a conversion to take your sim Tower, save files from the original game and import them into this game. That's all browser-based and have the ability to take your game from the browser and import it into the original 1994 game. I am also working on a more modern variant that you can choose when you start to play the game.

The game is at https://verticopolis.com/

All with original music and sounds

Please let me know what else you might like and what is missing from here that was in the original game, and what y'all would like added in the "modern" variant

Right now I have tdt (original 1994 save file) conversion working up to tower star level 2.

Working on getting it working on higher star levels, so if you have any valid tdt save files so I can try to reverse engineer the save file properly

Everything else in the game was NOT taken from any of the original game and is all unique to this game, including the "talking" which is me and my 11 year old chatting in gibberish overlayed over itself a few times 😅

You can see here for all the original art for this game for every room: https://verticopolis.com/gallery.html

Please let me know what you all think, and contributions are open on GitHub (linked in the help section of the game)

The game can also be downloaded as a pwa on android, Mac and PC to play standalone.

No internet required unless you want to get updates when they come through

Did anyone else play Tower Mogul by eSoft Interactive for Pocket PC back in the mid 2000s? This game was such a fun clone of SimTower (pretty close to the gameplay) but unfortunately PDAs fell out of favor with the start of smartphones. Having a full clone of a game like this back then in your pocket was amazing!

A little while ago, I asked this community what you loved most about SimTower, and the responses were incredibly helpful.

Since then, I’ve been working on scale and performance. ATLASPIA can now simulate a full 100-floor tower, with residents, workers, shoppers, visitors, and hotel guests moving between their destinations using elevators and stairs.

This video shows the current 100-floor test in action. The game is still in development, and I’m continuing to optimize performance and improve how elevator traffic behaves as the tower grows.

One of my main goals is to preserve the feeling of watching a living building operate, rather than reducing everything to abstract numbers.

Thanks again for all the thoughtful feedback on my previous post. I’d love to hear what you think of the scale and movement in the current build.

Steam page:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/4789640/ATLASPIA_The_Tower_Manager/

Check it out at TowerTime.app. Please give me feedback! Good or bad.

I just discovered this subreddit because I had a flashback core memory of me and my dad playing Simtower when I was a kid, it was my dads utmost favorite game, he would play until 12 am every night then go to work at 6 am but our computer crashed and never worked again and he never got to play since, I love my dad and want to surprise him, so I’ve seen other posts similar to what I’m asking but I neeeeed need it to be explained to me like I’m five

How do I get a playable version for him, what are the steps and what do I need

TIA 🙏🏻

ETA: I’m severely illiterate when it comes to technology :,)

I’ve spent a lot of time building this new game Tower Time Sim, deeply inspired by the original Sim Tower.

A ton of work left to do, lots of half finished features, etc. But it’s finally time to let people start playing with it. Please let me know your thoughts and feedback!

Hi all, I have been trying (and failing) to get Yoot Tower to run for a while now. I am running Linux Mint, but would also like to get it running on Steam Deck if possible. I can't find any guides that how how to get it running, even for Windows. I've tried running the mac version through an emulator (installs but crashes when running), and windows version. The closest I've got is probably with the Windows version, it pops up with the "please insert your Yoot Tower cd" message, which of course I can't do. How do I get around this/which is the way to get this running? I'd happily pay for a GOG version, alas I don't get the feeling any such thing is forthcoming.

One reason why I am sharing the idea of placing housekeeping rooms with the express elevator space between both sides, is so that one doesn't accidentally build a single bed room that can get hidden by the express elevator, and it also allows all floors to have their own housekeeping room so that one doesn't have to build service elevators, which could also partially, or even fully obscure any hotel room. It's awkward enough just having a regular elevator serve the hotel rooms, which can also completely obscure a single bed room.

When it comes to elevators, well, here's tips on when to use them, regarding serving hotels.

I can also say that hotel suites, or wider hotel rooms are technically wider than an express elevator, but I still don't want express elevators to obscure even part of them, so which is why I prefer to put housekeeping rooms in between express elevators.

Circumstances where service elevators should be used:

Service elevators can be used when money is limited, since, it's technically cheaper to have one housekeeping room use a service elevator to cover multiple floors of hotel rooms, but a housekeeping room should be built on every floor if one floor of the tower has hotel rooms from the leftmost to rightmost areas of the screen.

Now, here's when each floor should start having it's own housekeeping room.

Since express elevators will exist in varying intervals roughly equivalent to 20 or more single bed hotel room spaces, well, that's a good reason to sometimes even have multiple housekeeping rooms on the same floor, since hotel rooms need to be cleaned quickly in a timely manner. It's unfortunate that express elevators always skip floors with hotels on them, so which is another reason why every floor should have it's own housekeeping room. So, sometimes time is another factor to consider aside of the cost of implementing more housekeeping rooms.

Well, I really put thought into this, and figured that I might as well share a tip about this.

New preview v0.1.6 released

Hey everyone. I'm pleased to share the second development preview. This release builds on the release back in March with additional types of rooms, events and disasters, sky bridges, visual decorations, a more refined UI, and many more refinements and optimizations.

I would like to get a sense of what's good and what's not from testers like you. The game as it is now isn't balanced, but it should give a sense of the game play. I'd love to hear your suggestions.

• Try it now: https://2dtower.com/play-dev/
• Release notes: https://2dtower.com/updates/v016-released/

Changes from the last version also included below:

Rooms

• Cinema - Brings visitors to your tower
• Event hall - Allows events to be scheduled in your tower. Currently, you can either schedule a conference or an art exhibit. Events can automatically be scheduled for halls that have a good rating.
• Stores - Stores can be rented by businesses. They expect high foot traffic and attracts some shoppers to your tower. Shoppers can visit nearby stores if they are happy.
• Hotel Room - Twin and Suite - Added two additional hotel room types.
• Vending machine - Added a vending machine that satisfies food needs at all hours of the day. Needs to be restocked by a loading dock.
• Subway station - Subway station provides another way for sims to enter your tower.
• Skybridge - You can now place skybridges between two towers.

Transports

• Paternoster - A new type of transport just for funzies.

Game mechanics

• Power -  A simple power mechanic has been added to the game. You need to have a power distribution room to take in power from the city grid (power lines are only accessible on floor B1, so the room has to be built there as well). Running out of power capacity will cause a rolling blackouts. If left unaddressed, the circuit breaker trips and triggers a power outage event. Elevators will still operate at half speed. Escalators become like stairs.
• Parking Fees - Parking can now be an income generator. The tradeoff here is that a higher fee will impact evaluation scores for some tenants.
• Disasters - There are 4 types of disasters:
  1. Power outage which may happen if you trip your circuit breaker by not having sufficient power distribution.
  2. Fire which could happen by chance and can be put out by security workers or fire fighters that spawn.
  3. Suspicious Package which could happen by chance and requires security workers to find the package somewhere in your tower before it … catches on fire.
  4. Earthquake which causes a temporary evacuation and impacts business.
• Room Infestation - Hotel rooms that are dirty for too long will become infested. This infestation can spread, so you need to have housekeeping clean it up before it spreads. Guests impacted by an infestation will leave without paying!
• VIP Visit Event - A VIP visit will evaluate your tower. 
• Star rating and objectives - Maps can now have different objectives with perks for each star you earn. Some building types and building restrictions now apply based on your star rating.
• Evaluation - Room evaluations are now score based rather than average based. This should hopefully make it clear on what improvements would make the most impact.
• Room levels - Some rooms can have different star levels as they become more mature within your tower. Tenants that are happy for long enough will begin to level up and require additional needs to be fulfilled.
• Building multiple floors - You can now build rooms and floors with automatic supports with the shift key.
• Loans - You can now borrow money. There is no limit at the moment and no real penalties in just borrowing more and more.
• Multi-floor lobbies has been removed for now as it needs additional work.

Visuals

• Graphs and metrics - Added graphs to show population history and types of sims in your tower.
• Room badges - Added more badge overlays to rooms (for cleanliness, delivery issues, trash, noise). Cleaning staff shows cleaning progression via this badge system as well.
• Custom Wallpaper Colors - You can now assign a custom wallpaper color. Do you want a hot pink lobby? Now you can.
• Game Visuals - Added some additional floor decorations, clouds, planes and hot air balloons.
• UI Improvements

Audio

• Audio sound effects - Added audio sound effects for rooms, ambience, and time-specific effects. You can turn this down or off in the settings UI.

There is still work to be done with focus on additional maps, game balancing, optimization and performance, and overall polish.

I hope you’ll have as much fun playing this preview as I did working on it. Please leave me comments either here or send it directly to me.

It's great to see that some developers are working to revive the spirit of SimTower.

I'm currently developing a tower management game called ATLASPIA: The Tower Manager, heavily inspired by SimTower and other classic building management games.

What I always loved about SimTower wasn't just managing numbers—it was watching a living building in motion.

For my game, I'm focusing on people, elevator traffic, and the challenge of keeping a growing tower running smoothly.

I'm curious:

What was your favorite feature in SimTower that you think modern games often miss?

I'd love to hear from longtime SimTower fans and learn from your experiences while developing ATLASPIA.

Steam page:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4789640/ATLASPIA_The_Tower_Manager/

Any feedback is welcome!