The View from the DirtY Room
Say, do you remember Yoot Tower? The tower management simulator for the Mac and PC?
...well, do you remember SimTower for the Mac or PC?
If not, I'll fill you in on the details.
In the beginning: SimTower
SimTower (full American name: "SimTower: The Vertical Empire"), known in its native Japan as "The Tower", was a simulation game that put you in charge of building, operating, and otherwise managing a major commercial tower. You could add amenities such as restaurants, office space, and even apartments and condominiums to rent out to prospective tenants. It was a fairly open-ended game, with no real way to lose unless your game-allocated funds ran deep into debt...which wasn't that hard to do. Although the game didn't have any sort of real ending, the de facto goals were to successfully raise your tower's population up to 15,000 – thus earning it "Tower" status – and to build a cathedral on top of your otherwise finished tower and have a marriage ceremony take place there.
The game was originally made by Japanese game developer OPeNBooK Co. (now Vivarium Inc.) and released there in 1994; it was released in the United States that same year, except with Maxis as the publisher. It was a success in its native land and a failure here, one game in a string of Japanese import failures for Maxis that began with their port of popular Japanese train simulator A-Train a few years before.
However, SimTower was still deserving of a sequel, right?
Yes. And not just any sequel.
What SimTower needed was...
YOOT TOWER!
That's right. Yoot Tower – rendered within the game as "Yoot ToweR" – was the sequel to SimTower, known in Japan as "The Tower 2" and published by Sega in the United States in 1998 for the Macintosh and 1999 for Windows. Once again the brainchild of game designer Yoot Saito, Yoot Tower was largely the same game as its predecessor, retaining the same premise of building a successful tower whilst including minor added features and customization options.
It also happens to be the most awesome game ever created. And I'll now tell you why.
The Most Awesome Game Ever?
First off, you've got to love the RandoM CapitaL LetterS found at the beginning and ending of a few words in this game. I mean, if you're staying in a hotel room, wouldn't you want to know if it's a DirtY Room? I CertainlY WoulD.
Second off, the general Japanese craziness found in this game is just too awesome to be ignored. I mean, do you really see vertical shopping malls in the United States that contain schools, theaters, government offices, stadia, fast food joints, apartments, condominiums, and hotel rooms all in the same building? Yeah, I didn't think so. Yoot Saito eleventy billion, the Western world zero.
Third, the tower's patrons usually similarly kick ass. They don't take any guff, and they're more than willing to let you know about this lack-of-acceptance-of-guff by turning a disturbingly angry-looking shade of red at your tower's nearest crowded elevator when applicable.
With the above said, you'd think that Americans would be more inclinded to partake in this asskickingly awesome extraordinare than its predecessor, right?
The Failure and its Aftermath
Unfortunately, no. Yoot Tower had about the same level of success in Japan as its predecessor, selling well in the former but crappily in the latter. A multitude of planned expansion packs for it (including one about the Statue of Liberty, which sounds pretty awesome) were either cancelled or made for Japan only, with most of them just getting quietly killed off. Saito would make another Yoot Tower sequel – The Tower SP – for the Game Boy Advance in 2005, but only in Japan with no release planned for the United States. Damn you again, American video game consumers!
As the first two incarnations of Yoot Saito's tower simulator were failures in the United States and the third was exclusive to Japan, it now appears that Yoot Tower (or is it Yoot ToweR? YooT ToweR? DiRtY RoOm? whatever) will forever be the English language's last edition of the series, crazy capitalization and all.
I fully expect that ten years from now, I'll still occasionally play Yoot Tower, still finding free time in 2019 to criticize those pesky Americans who didn't give it any support back in 1998 and 1999. If it's still a fun game eleven years after I first picked it up at MacWorld (and saw an awesome Yoot Tower arcade machine...how can you top that?!?), then I fully expect it to be fun for at least another eleven.
So, in conclusion, if you didn't pick up anything from this article up to this point, leave yourself with this one timeless quote from Yoot Tower's "young office worker" NPC (pictured to the right):
Let me have the potato too.
And may Yoot be with you.
Got any questions, corrections, or other concerns about Yoot Tower and/or my article on it? Love it? Hate it? Think I'm a weirdo for writing about it? Send an email to captainnosebleed (at) electronicrenaissance (dot) com, and your comments could end up in the next edition of Captain's Mailbox.
You can also discuss this article at its associated forum topic.
