Last weekend at PAX, one of the booths tucked into the back of the Indie Megabooth area was attended by people wearing hard hats and safety vests. When I walked up, I overheard someone ask if their game was like Tiny Tower. Behind one of the hard-hatted men was a monitor proclaiming the same thing he was about to say: "No, it's more like SimTower." They were discussing Project Highrise, SomaSim's new management game.
Although Project Highrise is SomaSim's second game, their first being 1849, it was already on their minds when the studio was founded. "In fact, that was the game we wanted to make first. But once we started thinking about what that would involve, we pretty quickly realized that the scope didn't match what we could afford at the time," says Matt Viglione, one of SomaSim's founders. "The idea for 1849 was also floating around at the same time, so we looked at that and figured that's the game we could more easily get done in the timeline we had. So then we just hoped that 1849 would be enough of a success to allow the studio to continue along. And it was."
Project Highrise wasn't envisioned as a modern take on SimTower, though Viglione considers comparisons to be inevitable. "The reason that the original SimTower succeeded is because the subject of its simulation was inherently fascinating," he says. "So we went back to that -- what makes skyscrapers and large urban buildings good targets for a simulation game...