Before every old game had a wiki, somebody had to discover that holding Ctrl, Alt and Shift while placing a lobby in SimTower could make the lobby three stories tall, then build a webpage so everyone else could know it too.
Visit Ruben’s preserved SimTower page
The surviving site is exactly that sort of page. It is a compact fan resource for Maxis and OpenBook’s skyscraper-management game, full of practical hints about tower ratings, elevators, hotel infestations, staircases, tenant complaints and the strange little keyboard combinations players learned by experimentation or passed around online.
One surviving cheats page explains how Ctrl and Alt create a two-story lobby, while adding Shift produces a three-story version. It warns that the impressive lobby costs more to maintain. It also explains how to build multi-story stairs, why tenants complain that there is “No Transport Connected,” and why a hotel room displaying a bug icon should probably be bulldozed before the infestation spreads.
This is not high literature. It is excellent historical documentation.
Game knowledge used to live on small personal sites
A modern player looking for SimTower help will probably encounter a wiki, a video, a forum archive or a large database. In the 1990s and early 2000s, much of that information lived on personal pages whose authors organized the material however they felt like organizing it.
That meant screenshots, handwritten walkthroughs, cheat lists, image galleries and sentences such as “Abra Cadabra! You have a two/three story staircase!”
The personality is part of the value.
The page survives today inside Rubenerd’s retro museum rather than pretending it was written yesterday. That preservation choice gives the material context. It remains useful to somebody actually playing SimTower, but it also shows how fan documentation worked before the Web consolidated around a handful of giant platforms.
For search, the details matter: SimTower lobby cheats, tower ratings, express lifts, hotel bugs, multi-story staircases, transport connections and the game’s specific building mechanics. These are exactly the narrow terms that can make an old page useful decades after its layout stopped being fashionable.
This is also why CacheRat’s 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list keeps turning up things that are more useful than their age suggests. A tiny fan page can preserve one game’s accumulated folk knowledge better than a polished corporate retrospective ever would.
The skyscraper is fictional. The documentation problem was real.