A Thinker in Space

For more information about this series, please see the introductory article here.

If you know what games I played as a kid well enough, you knew this one was on the horizon. Alongside Insaniquarium and Zoombinis, this is probably one of the most significant childhood games I will be discussing, for a plethora of reasons (not the least of which being the sheer number of hours I spent playing it). Icy Tower was released on PC in 2001, and went through a few different iterations throughout its lifespan. As a young gamer, I played this game in its first and second iterations, spending most of my time on the original style. The game went through a visual overhaul in its 1.4 release, but remained, at its core, the same game.

I was introduced to Icy Tower at the summer camp I went to for the whole of my childhood (and worked at into adulthood). They had an activity called Computers, which was my favorite, and we would learn and play games during the activity window. Icy Tower was a free-play activity that was available for each computer, and I would play it frequently (amongst other games, of course).

The thing that kept Icy Tower fresh for me was actually not just the game itself – instead, it was the fact that it was super easy to mod. I never got into game modding as a hobby, except when it came to Icy Tower. As a kid, I loved to play around with recording software. My dad let my brother and I (and the rest of the family, but we were the ones who took the most interest) use a microphone when we were younger to record hours and hours of potentially mortifying audio (if relistened to nowadays). It was a ton of fun, and brings back a lot of great memories. Why am I bringing this up in an article about a video game released in 2001? Good question. In order to that, I have to tell you a little bit about:

The Game

Icy Tower is a platformer – you play as one of two characters and jump from platform to platform. However, it isn’t a normal horizontal platformer like a metroidvania – instead, it is a vertical platformer. You are constantly jumping upwards to the next platform, going one by one or using running starts to jump multiple in a row (crucial to getting past floor 300). The screen slowly moves up, and if you get stuck on a platform on the bottom of the screen, game over. If you fall, game over. You restart from floor one. Your goal is to get as high up as possible. Easy enough, except that as time goes on, the game moves faster and you need to stay on your toes in order to stay alive. You can no longer do just single jumps after the third or fourth bell (which rings with a “Hurry Up” sound effect after a determined interval) – instead, you must jump multiple platforms and keep your momentum. The game is very challenging, especially from floor 300+.

And that’s it. That’s the whole game. Jumping platforms to see how high you can get, and trying to beat your personal record (or a friend’s record). So why did I bring up the microphone?

If you don’t know what modding is – the concept is simple: you replace game assets with your own. Basically, you change something in the game, adding your own flair to it. Modding communities exist for thousands of video games, and Icy Tower is no exception. The simplest way to mod Icy Tower is to add new characters. The game comes with two, but it makes it very easy to create more. I found a site that made Icy Tower mods and downloaded a bunch of characters I liked, and played with them. But that wasn’t enough for little me – I noticed that all I had to do to add a character was drop a folder into the game files. If it was that easy, wouldn’t it be easy to make my own? Reverse engineering the system, I learned how to replace audio files with my own, handcrafted audio (hence the recording). I would make sounds for the characters as they jumped, fell, and paused the game, recording them with my own voice. My brother got involved, and we made a bunch of them ourselves. This wasn’t enough for me, though. I wanted to figure out not only how to change the audio, but also how to create my own characters. I found success after editing the image file, creating some masterpieces like:

I have never been good at art, digital or otherwise, as you can see. In the original game, this was again not enough for me. There was a cool character I had downloaded that not only had its own audio and image, but changed the colors of the game itself to black and white. Once again, I reverse-engineered the game and ended up discovering that changing the colors in the palette would change the colors of the floors. Through experimenting, I created this guide:

And then was able to create headache-inducing monstrosities like this:

And some high quality ones as well:

This was so much fun for me as a kid, and it kept the game fresh – I was constantly adding new characters and competing with them, trying to get to the highest floor while creating a constant feed of new characters to play with. Because this game is so personalized now, I have returned to it again and again for a nostalgia bomb (as I did while writing this article).

Does it hold up?

Icy Tower remains a solid arcade-style game, despite the fact that it is now 23 years old. The visual overhaul in 2009 was much-needed to keep the game up-to-date (although the palette changing that I mentioned earlier was no longer easy to accomplish). In this version, the developers also added a surprisingly in-depth statistics page that gave a ton of information, from highest floor to highest combo to total floors jumped, as well as an account system so that different players can keep their records straight. This was a significant improvement to the quality of the game as it gave tangible goals for the player that makes you want to play and replay the game to try and break your record (something that the game Snail Mail could learn from). So overall, yes – this game holds up well, and remains a lot of fun even when compared to the rest of the content in today’s oversaturated gaming market.

Accessibility

And therein lies the rub. This game was super easy to get a hold of, being distributed by Free Lunch Design for, well, free, for many many years, but after being bought out by another small-scale gaming company, all trace of Icy Tower was removed from official sites. Because of this, the game is now considered abandonware. It is available to download from multiple third-party sites, and since it was free in the first place, as long as the site is trustworthy the game is still available for download.

Final Thoughts

Icy Tower is an addicting and fun, startlingly simple game. It does one thing, and it does it well, and it keeps the player coming back for more. Its goal is to give you a couple quick rounds of mindless but engaging entertainment, and it does so while being relatively mechanically unique (especially for its time). If you’re looking for a quick arcade-style distraction, Icy Tower is the perfect choice for you. Don’t expect depth, but do expect to end a round and potentially feel that “just one more round and then I’ll stop” pressure repeatedly!

(Underrated Games #10)

Recommended for Younger Players?

There is nothing going on in Icy Tower that is objectionable in the least, and the game is fun! The only drawback is its addictive quality, but even there it is relatively harmless and can help teach kids how to manage time even when they feel the pressure to just keep playing.

Verdict: Yes.

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