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'Tiny Tower' creators rail against Zynga's 'Dream Heights' clone

'Tiny Tower' creators rail against Zynga's 'Dream Heights' clone

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A new game from Zynga, dubbed Dream Heights, has caused some consternation over at Nimblebit, the small dev team responsible for Tiny Tower. You see, Dream Heights looks and plays an awful like the hugely successful Tiny Tower, albeit with a slightly different graphical aesthetic.

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tiny tower dream heights
tiny tower dream heights

A new game from Zynga, dubbed Dream Heights, has caused some consternation over at Nimblebit, the small dev team responsible for Tiny Tower. You see, Dream Heights looks and plays an awful lot like the hugely successful Tiny Tower, albeit with a slightly different graphical aesthetic. Without openly calling Zynga's new game a ripoff, the Nimblebit trio has put together an infographic that places screenshots of the two games side by side, adding only the comment that "we are looking forward to inspiring you with our future games!" Not exactly the most cryptic of messages.

Although we sympathize with Nimblebit here — Zynga isn't really trying very hard to be original with its competing product — it bears mentioning that Tiny Tower in itself isn't an entirely innovative concept. It was preceded by Yoot Saito's Tower series, which started on the PC and Mac way back in the mid-90s, before being ported to the GBA, Nintendo DS, and even iOS. The innovation from Nimblebit has been to simplify the interface and make it work so well on a small-size screen, which has served as the "inspiration" that Zynga has taken with its latest iOS game.