Tiny Tower is a Raising Sim for iOS and Android. It has an 8-bit theme, combined with non-chiptune lounge music. Created by NimbleBit in 2011, it is one of the most addictive and successful free iPhone games of all time. Although the full version of the game is free, you can pay real money to buy more bux, which is useful for lots of stuff, including converting bux into coins. Coins are the main currency unit of Tiny Tower.
The objective is to build the tallest tower and to give jobs to the NPCs that live in Tiny Tower. They are called Bitizens, which is a combination word of the words bit and citizen. Each of them have their own Dream Job, which allows their business to have double stock. Some have low skill levels overall, some have a mixture of low and high skill levels, while others have high skill levels overall. The game has no ending, even if you have no new types of floors to construct.
In 2016, NimbleBit released a huge update to the game to celebrate its 5th anniversary, adding dozens of new floors, costumes, missions, a new form of currency, and the Rebuild feature.
Two spinoffs have been released for the game, including a Star Wars-themed spin-off called Star Wars: Tiny Death Star and Tiny Tower Vegas, a gambling-themed version of the game. Due to Executive Meddling, Disney pulled Tiny Death Star from the App Store and Google Play as they wanted to take the Star Wars games in a different direction.
Tiny Tower contains examples of:
- Adam Smith Hates Your Guts: The price to build a floor goes up with each new floor built, even if the floor is always empty.
- And Your Reward Is Clothes: There are dozens of costumes available for your Bitizens. Originally, they were purchasable using bux, but now they can be acquired for free if the player happens to deliver a bitizen wearing a costume.
- Bribing Your Way to Victory: There are two forms of currency earned in the game, coins and Tower Bux. While both can be acquired without spending a dime, Tower Bux are useful for obtaining more coins (the main form of currency), speeding up construction, and generally just making your life easier.
- Character Customization: You are allowed to dress up and rename all of your bitizens however you want.
- Cosmetic Award: The 2016 update added many new features that can be added to your tower, most of which add nothing to the gameplay. This means that your elevator can have the appearance of the Infini-Lift Lightspeed, originally the fastest elevator upgrade in the game, but still be slow as molasses. By contrast, you can have the rusty default elevator from the beginning of the game, but upgrade it to the fastest motor speed.
- Early-Installment Weirdness:
- Missions were more rare in the earlier versions of the game.
- Bux were also more scarce and you would usually only get 2 for completing a mission.
- Every once in a while you would get 2 bux just for delivering a bitizen to a floor.
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Fridge Logic: New floors are able to be built straight on top of the tower while everyone is still in it. - Frothy Mugs of Water: Businesses will sell root beer and sparkling grape juice. There's even a pub business which has absolutely no alcoholic beverages for sale.
- iPhony: The Mapple Store, which sells MyPods, MyPhones, and MyBooks. Even the uniform looks practically identical to what Apple Store workers wear in real life.
- Meta Game: The Tiny Tower subreddit is metagaming paradise. every time a player rebuilds they make a post where they giveaway all of their bitizens. People also make costume request post's letting players unlock all the costumes in a quick amount of time.
- Money for Nothing: This game has the problem of requiring both coins and "bux". Bux is rarely earned and is used for most everything in the game, coins are gained from your businesses and are really only used for expanding the tower. Chances are the coins you earn turn into this trope. NimbleBit rectified this in the 2016 update, which made bux a lot easier to obtain, making it easily possible to earn hundreds of bux in a single day.
- New Game Plus: The Rebuild feature in the 2016 update allows players to exchange 50 floors of their tower in exchange for a Golden Ticket, a new form of currency for the game. Golden Tickets can either be used to maximize the level of a business and increase its stock or completely max out the skills of the Bitizens if used on a residential floor. Golden Tickets can be won normally through hourly raffles, though.
- Parody Names:
- Bitbook
- Mapple Store
- Shout-Out:
- The default name for the fast food restaurant is Sky Burger, the name of another game by NimbleBit.
- Many costumes are based of other characters, such as Domo, Mario, Luigi, and Princess Peach.
- One of the missions has a reference to the famous "Are you a bad enough dude?" line from the classic arcade game Bad Dudes.
- Pun: One possible Bitbook post reads as follows:"I have a phobia of negative numbers... I'll stop at nothing to avoid them!"
- Take That!: After Zynga made a ripoff of Tiny Tower, Tiny Tower responded by adding an in-game quest called "Beware of Dog" (Zynga's logo is a bulldog), which involves ripping off another company's game. Even better, the icon for it is one of the in-game citizens in a devil costume.
- In addition, one of the things that can be posted on Bitbook is "What ever happened to Dream Heights?", Dream Heights being the name of said ripoff. (For those curious, Zynga eventually shut it down after it stopped making enough money, a common trend for their games.)
- Tech Tree: A July 2022 update to the game added a skill tree to the game. One tech point can be acquired every 4 hours and they can be used on various upgrades, from simple improvements such as increasing coins earned per floor or faster restocking, but high level updates include things like extra Golden Tickets or the ability to have an extra Bitizen on residential floors.
