Icy Tower

A combination of a platform and action game, the goal of the game character is to climb a tower by jumping onto steps of a staircase inside it. The game brings you custom characters, unlockable floors types, replays to share with your friends, lots of combo rewards and more!

Released: 22 December 2001
Platforms: Java virtual machine Windows macOS
Genres: Action Arcade Platformer
Developers: —
Publishers: —
Modes: Single-player
Perspective: Side view
Themes: Action Fantasy Kids
Engine: Allegro, Adobe Flash
Country: Sweden

About

Icy Tower is a freeware video game by Swedish game developer Free Lunch Design. It is a platform game set in a tower, where the player's goal is to jump from one "floor" to the next and go as high as possible without falling and plunging off the screen. The higher the player's character climbs, the faster the tower's floors move downward and the harder the game becomes. By default, the player controls the character using a keyboard.

Keywords

wall climbing
castle
wall jump
instant replay
male protagonist
highscore

Media

The articlegameplay, story, development, reception

Gameplay

The player starts the game on the tower's first floor. To climb the tower, the player must jump from floor to floor (default control: space bar). The character can pass through the floors from below, but lands on them when falling from above. Once the player has landed on a floor, they can move across its surface using the arrow keys.

By moving across the floor, the player builds momentum for the next jump. The character can also bounce off the vertical walls on the left and right edges of the tower, allowing them to switch direction while maintaining momentum.

Development

Free Lunch Design created Icy Tower using the C programming language and the Allegro game library. Its designers were inspired by Xjump, a game for the Linux operating system.

On 14 March 2007, a press release was published on the Free Lunch Design website announcing a partnership between FLD and mobile game developer Xendex Entertainment for the porting of Icy Tower to the mobile environment. Icy Tower Mobile (ITM) was released on 6 October 2008. Due to the then-current limitations of mobile platforms, the game lacked several features in its PC counterpart, such as recording or sharing replays, and changing game characters.

Reception

Icy Tower ranked high in the "Most Popular" ranking of the "PC games" section in the Download.com software directory website; its average monthly number of downloads was "more than 20,000" in 2006, amounting to over five million as of 2009. The total number of Icy Tower downloads was estimated at over 11 million in 2008. In terms of the number of websites devoted to the game, it is most popular in Czech Republic, Germany and Poland. Central European countries are also home to a major portion of top Icy Tower players. According to Johan Peitz, the author of the game, the reason behind the popularity of Icy Tower is that it allows players to compete in several different categories, for example in striving for both high floors and high scores.

Online Icy Tower communities allow their members to exchange high scores, replays and comments about the game and its gameplay. Additionally, players frequently compete against themselves in online competitions. Icy Tower tournaments usually consist of a number of rounds, each lasting one or more days. In every round, contestants are required to record one or more replays with a result in a specific category of the game. Players have also organized live meetings, which took place in Cracow and Warsaw, Poland and Prague, Czech Republic.