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“If you break it down to its materials it’s generic,” says Gage. Though it wasn’t the initial intention, SpellTower fits into that mold neatly, with its easy-to-understand gameplay and simple, pleasing visuals. “They have to be able to slot into somebody’s life no matter what stage of their life they’re in.”

“There’s a blandness, or a generic quality, to classics,” says Gage. While many games set themselves apart through clever writing or art, there’s a certain type - Gage calls them “classics” - that need to be purposefully generic. Part of revisiting the game so many years later meant coming to terms with what SpellTower is. (Gage says he considered launching on Apple Arcade, but felt that “this is a game that has a preexisting audience, and it isn’t fair to take it away from them.”)

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By streamlining the experience, adding more things to do, and - crucially - making the game free to download, the hope is that SpellTower+ will be able to reach a larger audience and extend the concept’s life for even longer. It also has a cleaner look, a jazzy soundtrack, quality-of-life features like iCloud backup, and five additional game modes for a total of 11.įor Gage - whose past work includes reimaginings of games like chess, pool, and solitaire - the idea was to turn SpellTower into a more evergreen experience. It was a confusing mess, and now the game has been streamlined for multiple screen sizes. Then, as phones steadily increased in size, phone players were able to use the iPad board as well. For instance, SpellTower was originally designed for iPads, and later a smaller game board was added for people on phones. The idea was to remove much of the excess that had built up over the years. Gage partnered with developer Jack Schlesinger on the new iteration, and the pair built SpellTower+ entirely from scratch.

And he did just that: today sees the release of SpellTower+ on iOS. “For years I’ve been thinking ‘The right thing to do is to make a reboot,’” Gage explains.

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People were still playing, but there were bugs and the code was a mess. But over the years, as new features were added, the game become somewhat unwieldy. Its approachable nature reached a varied audience, including everyone from traditional gamers battling for a high score to grandparents who would play it every morning. The result was SpellTower, a mashup of word games and puzzlers, which went on to become one of his most popular titles to date, with more than 1 million downloads. In 2011, designer Zach Gage decided to try something different: make a game in a genre he hated.