Tower of the World (PC, Amiga) - Games That Weren't

1996 Yavor / Metropolis

Platforms: PC and Commodore Amiga

One of the most ambitious Polish role playing games of the 1990s. Tower of the World was a huge fantasy RPG that had been quietly evolving for a number of years before eventually being taken under the wing of Metropolis, creators of TeenAgent and Tajemnica Statuetki.

The project originated with programmer Jarosław Chrostowski and acclaimed Polish science fiction author Wiktor Żwikiewicz, who set out to create what they hoped would be a completely new kind of role-playing game. Work reportedly began around 1990, initially targeting the Commodore Amiga before later expanding to the PC. As development continued, the game was repeatedly redesigned to take advantage of higher resolutions, protected mode memory and more powerful processors, whilst the storyline and interface also grew considerably.

The scale of the project quickly became one of its biggest talking points in the Polish gaming press. Preview articles described a vast fantasy world made up of continents, archipelagos, forests, deserts, mountain ranges, frozen wastelands and huge oceans that could be explored by ship rather than simply crossed via static travel screens. Journeys at sea were even planned to feature encounters with sea monsters, adding another layer to exploration.

Players would control a party of up to eight adventurers, taking on quests that gradually unfolded into a much larger overarching story. The opening of the game was intended to serve as both a prologue and tutorial, placing players in control of a group of children before the main adventure began.

Rather than using a traditional first-person RPG view, Tower of the World planned to blend several different styles together. Exploration was presented in a pseudo-3D perspective similar to games such as Might & Magic, whilst combat would switch to a separate tactical battlefield where positioning and strategy would become far more important. According to previews, the developers believed they had been working on these ideas long before similar mechanics became popular elsewhere.

Perhaps the most ambitious aspect was the simulation itself. Articles claimed that the game world would behave almost like a living ecosystem, with weather systems, environments and wildlife all interacting together. One magazine even described it as nothing less than a “world simulator”, suggesting the attention to detail risked becoming a problem for the game due to the sheer scale.

Originally expected to launch during 1995, release dates steadily slipped into 1996 as development continued. The project eventually became planned as a CD-ROM only release, requiring at least a 486 PC with 8MB of RAM, whilst the Amiga version had reportedly become so demanding that only accelerated Amiga 1200 systems or the Amiga 4000 were expected to run it comfortably.

Sadly, Tower of the World never reached completion. Reports suggested development continued for around five years, but according to later accounts disagreements between the development team and publisher Metropolis eventually brought funding to an end during 1996.

Although the game itself remains unreleased, a surprising amount of material has survived. Magazine previews documented its progress over several years, and thanks to Rygar we are now able to add a collection of previously unseen development images recovered from original animation files. These offer a fascinating glimpse at environments, interface elements and battle scenes that had never been shown publicly before.

We hope to learn more over time to update this page, and perhaps even find something of the game itself to be able to play on either PC or Amiga.

With huge thanks to Rygar for the many magazine scans, information and previously unseen development images which have helped document the game’s history.