As the iPhone and iPod Touch continue to sell like hotcakes, more and more simple games are being viewed as portable crack. Angry Birds still manages to find millions of people in caves somewhere that haven’t played it yet, while Tiny Wings dive bombs other unsuspecting victims.
One of the newer addictions is Tiny Tower – a “freemium” app, that’s free to download and play, with the option of paying money to advance in the game quicker. The game seems innocent enough. Pixel art styled “bitizens” inhabit a 2D tower that you, the player, are building higher and higher. You want to earn enough money from different types of floors (such as Retail, Service, Food, etc.) in order to build more floors, ad infinitum, in an effort to make a monolith that rivals the Tower of Babel.
The game is becoming an epidemic. Several of my peers in the game industry have confessed to a Tiny Tower addiction. When I tried to warn my sister of the game’s danger, I learned that she already had a 20 floor high tower of her own. When my fiancee is on her iPod Touch, she’s not checking Twitter like a normal person – she’s playing freakin’ Tiny Tower.
