Yesterday, Zynga CEO Mark Pincus dismissed criticism levelled at the remarkable similarities between its upcoming Dream Heights and Nimblebit’s Tiny Tower. "Just as our games and mechanics have inspired and accelerated the game industry, its 30-year body of work has inspired us too," he said after rattling off a list of other tower-based games on iOS that he suggested made up a tower ‘genre’ that absolves Zynga of wrong-doing: SimTower, Tower Of Babel, Yoot Tower, Tower Up, Tower Town and Tower Blocks.
So let's look at each of the games he listed and see how they compare to Tiny Tower (and therefore Dream Heights). Is Tiny Tower simply building on the foundation of its forebears?
SimTower
The 1994 granddaddy, and the source of most of the arguments against Tiny Tower's innovation. But while Tiny Tower makes micromanagement compulsive, trading on the empathy you build with your individually named and dressed Bitizens - and their inability to press a lift button - SimTower is about systems and balance, and therefore is more or less a repurposed SimCity. There’s none of Tiny Tower's realtime management here, instead a sandbox in which functioning eco-systems can be gently nudged into being.
Yoot Tower
Yoot Tower is the spiritual sequel, originally released in 1998 by SimTower's game director, Yoot Saito, but not for original publisher Maxis. It merely adds a few new systems to the original sandbox.
Tower Of Babel
Tower Of Babel is the English language version of Facebook game SoleTower. SoleTower seems to bear more similarity to Plants Vs Zombies' Zen Garden mode than Tiny Tower, its tower setting apparently being a metaphor for a highscore table (each player is given a single floor) and the object of the game to manage the needs of a series of customers in order to earn money from them. Some of Tiny Towers' Bitizens management, then, but that's where the similarity seems to end.
Tower Up
Uken Games’ simplistic Tower Up sees players attempt to manage a hotel in which they layer suites, bars and even apartments on top of each other – when the agonisingly slow-loading assets actually pop into being, that is – and features none of Tiny Tower’s Bitizens’ tastes and dreams, jobs or the resulting stacking bonuses. It certainly features some of Tiny Towers' realtime management features, but it's a markedly different game.
Tower Blocks
We’re confused at Tower Blocks' inclusion on Pincus' list. Either he's misspelled the name of Digital Chocolate's 2007 one-button arcade stack ‘em up Tower Bloxx, or he really did intend to reference its clone. Regardless, neither game adds any weight to Pincus’ defence, what with only sharing the tower setting in common. With Pincus throwing out reasoning like this, why not just throw Rampage in there?
Happy Peeps: Tower Town
This is the closest relation in the list to Tiny Tower, but while developer Crowdstar Network has clearly been inspired by Nimblebit’s game, it has stamped its own personality on the concept by adding multiple towers, asset mining and a decidedly less frenetic pace to play. Oh, and it came out in November, five months after Tiny Tower. Sorry, Mark.
So, it's fair to say that Pincus has entirely failed to prove here that Tiny Tower is merely one of a raft of similar games, and that Dream Heights' similarities are therefore fair game.
Like it or not, Tiny Tower has taken on many existing mechanics and ideas, some from games like Corporation Inc., to which Pincus doesn't even refer, and made a game that's very much its own. That's rather more than can be claimed of Dream Heights.