The Tiny Game from a Tiny Studio That Had a Massive Impact on LEGO Games

November 3, 2021 0 By Brian Crecente

LEGO® Tower was a tiny game made by a tiny studio that spearheaded a very big idea at LEGO Games.

The game, developed by two-person studio NimbleBit in 2019, was LEGO Games’ first overt attempt to appeal to the massive older audience found within the world of video games. It was also the first mobile game released by LEGO Games after that arm of the LEGO Group reworked its strategy for games.

The idea of the game was born of NimbleBit’s first breakout success: Tiny Tower.

NimbleBit was founded by brothers David and Ian Marsh in 2009 and found moderate success with Pocket Frogs. But it was 2011’s Tiny Tower that thrust the diminutive studio into the spotlight.

After Pocket Frogs, the duo decided to make their next game another free-to-play title, and they were enthralled with the pixel art look of a game called Fez, especially the look of the 8-bit hero, Ian Marsh said. They wanted to use that art style in their new title and tried applying it to a restaurant management game.

“When we were mocking up the artwork and displaying it on the iPhone, we tried first to do it in a landscape orientation, because that was a good fit for a single floor of a building,” Ian Marsh said. “But we were also trying to mock it up in a portrait view. And we started noticing that we could kind of stack multiple floors on this restaurant, and it would be in a very natural shape for holding the iPhone up in a portrait view. And so then we started thinking, ‘Well, why couldn’t we go even higher?’ And, ‘It doesn’t make sense to have a 20-story restaurant. So, what if we thought of each floor as a completely different business or apartment?’ And from there, it kind of grew naturally into the Tiny Tower we know today.”

The game took about six months to develop and was released in June 2011.

In the diminutive business simulator, players manage a tower that houses apartments for a growing number of tiny bitizen people. The goal of Tiny Tower is to attract more bitizens who can move into the apartments, fill jobs at businesses, and go about their lives in the various shops. Each floor is an apartment or one of an eclectic mix of businesses from coffee shops to laundromats, to fortune tellers.

While the game had a strong start, Ian Marsh said it wasn’t really something to take notice of ≠ that was until it started receiving a lot of mass media attention. Wired, The New York Times, Time, and Paste, all started writing about the little game made by two brothers. Then Apple named Tiny Tower the U.S. iPhone Game of the Year.

Tiny Tower continued to grow and soon companies were approaching NimbleBit about creating themed spinoffs.

The first was Disney, which was interested in seeing if the Tiny Tower concept could be applied to the Death Star. The 2013 release of Star Wars™: Tiny Death Star was followed by the release of Tiny Tower Vegas in 2014.

While the small studio continued to support Tiny Tower, the developers shifted their focus to other games like Disco Zoo, Letterpad, and Words Royale.

But in 2016, a random piece of fan art would set the stage for NimbleBit to return to the Tiny Tower idea with some interesting twists.

“A Flickr user named WarmHandSanitizer had posted some renders he had made of Tiny Tower floors imagined in LEGO bricks,” Ian Marsh said. “They were just awesome to see, and everyone who saw them went crazy for them. We thought it was really cool.”

In the spring of 2017, the LEGO Group contacted the studio and asked if they’d be interested in creating a game for the international toy company.

One of the pitches NimbleBit sent back to the LEGO Group was the idea of a LEGO brick take on Tiny Tower. Those amazing Tiny Tower brick fan renders ended up winning over the company.

LEGO Tower was clearly never meant to be a simple reskinning of Tiny Tower. There were several major changes and functions designed around the LEGO theme and core approach to play added to this new product.

The team didn’t just host playtesting for the game. They also worked with the LEGO Group to host contests that had fans create both digital and physical LEGO towers for the upcoming game.

Part of that contest also turned into a successful run for a Guinness World Record for the largest LEGO brick diorama.

That event, which was hosted at the LEGO House in Billund, Denmark on June 23, 2019, saw the creation of 540 LEGO brick floors, which combined to form a massive building that was more than 226 square feet big and used about 900 pounds of LEGO elements.

LEGO Tower was released on iPhone and Android devices the next month and has been a rousing success with about 9 million people downloading the game in the first year. Today, LEGO Tower is approaching 20 million downloads.

This article originally ran on LEGO.com as a summary of episode one of the weekly Bits N’ Bricks podcast, which you can listen to here.