the dna of tower studios

16-bit development

Tower Studios was the coming together of friends from two different 16-bit development studios: Sensible Software and The Bitmap Brothers. The pair had worked with each other during the Nineties and Jon Hare, Mike Montgomery and John Phillips were close friends. Tower’s greatest successes has come from revitalising or reimagining 16-bit titles such as Speedball 2.

Football

Given Jon Hare’s immense success with Sensible Soccer over the years, it’s obvious football runs through this Norwich City fan’s veins. “After selling Sensible Software to Codemasters, I basically never stopped working on football games for about four years,” Jon says. Of those titles, Sensible Soccer on mobile and Sociable Soccer are Tower Studios releases.

mobile market

Born from a desire to take advantage of mobile handsets capable of running games, Tower Studios dedicated its early years to such development and kept coming back to it, particularly in 2010 with Shoot To Kill and again in 2014 with Word Explorer when the developer was able to target the iphone market by publishing games made on its behalf by Vivid Games.

Collaboration

Since Tower Studios has had no direct staff of its own, it has long sought to work with others. While Jon Hare, Mike Montgomery and John Phillips were hands-on with software development to start with, Jon did a deal with Vivid Games in Poland in 2009 and it became one of Tower Studios’ major collaborators. Today, Vivid Games is best known for Real Boxing for PC, Mac and mobile devices.

Challenging environment

Tower Studios has by no means been a flop company: it continues to flourish today and it has had three number one charting games out of ten which is a decent return. But Jon Hare is the first to admit that releasing original IP today is not as easy as it once was, so the company has had to rely on spins on established games and devise new methods of working.