Or is it a Colony Sim?
Short Answer: Yes, Dracula’s Castle is indeed a Sim Tower game. Well, maybe a SimTower game is more accurate. Tower Sim perhaps?
I was recently re-tagging Dracula’s Castle on Steam to get some more accuracy out of the Steam algorithm and part of that is assigning genres and sub-genres to your game. In the end, I went with Colony Sim – because it seems to be the best fit – but I couldn’t not think of Sim Tower.
(And thinking of colony building games, the idea of Dracula running a colony seems a bit absurd… Maybe I’ll do a sequel game: Dracula 2142, where he’s in charge of running a moonbase on Titan.)
What Even Is Sim Tower?
If you’re not familiar with the term Sim Tower, let me explain. It’s a game that was released back in 1994, well actually it was called SimTower: The Vertical Empire.
This is well before The Sims began it’s domination run in the early 00’s. It was a curious game, originally a Japanese creation by Yoot Saito, one which got onto legendary SimCity creator Will Wright’s radar and was subsequently localized for Western audiences and rebadged with the Sim (or Sims?) brand.
The Sim spin-offs were usually very original, I remember as a kid being fascinated by SimAnt as well (the fact that it made me think of Honey I Shrunk the Kids probably helped). I loved SimTower for its originality at the time and in fact I had a lot of fun many years later with Star Wars: Tiny Death Star, which greatly reminded me of it. (It also happens to have the best Star Wars pixel art, ever. Not to mention the Imperial March brilliantly re-imagined as an elevator tune!)
So here’s to SimTower and the plucky young Yoot Saito! Maybe it’s time it officially got its own sub-genre?
To those of you coming back after reading Dev Diary #1, hey I made it back! I guess this isn’t technically a Dev Diary but I am working on something. Hopefully I’ll have it up soon.