Play Skyrise — a free skyscraper sim Runs natively — no emulator
Skyrise is a skyscraper you build and run, floor by floor. Rent offices, sell apartments, open hotels, shops and a cinema, then keep thousands of people moving between them with stairs, escalators and banks of elevators. Grow the population to earn stars, and at five stars top out at floor 100. No download, no sign-up, nothing to install.
Written from scratch for ExeBrowser in plain JavaScript. Every room, person and sound is drawn or synthesised by the game itself, so it starts instantly and runs on a phone. Open it full screen.
Controls — what does what
| Action | How |
|---|---|
| Start | Pick Build and drag a ground-floor lobby first. Nothing else can be placed until it exists. |
| Build | Choose a tool in the bottom bar, then click (or drag, for rows and lift shafts) in the tower. Cost and the star needed show on each tool. |
| Move around | Drag the view, scroll the wheel, or use + and −. On a phone, drag with one finger and pinch to zoom. |
| Add lift cars | Lifts, then click an existing shaft. Adjust lifts stretches a shaft or switches floors on and off. |
| Inspect | Inspect, then click a room, a person or a lift to see how they're doing and change rent. |
| Find problems | Mood, Rent and Hotel on the map panel colour the tower by tenant mood, price and dirty rooms. |
| Speed / save | Pause and speed buttons top right. Save and load are in the ☰ menu. |
What it is
Skyrise is a tower simulator: a side-on cross-section of a building where every tenant is a few dozen little people with a schedule. Office workers arrive at eight, crowd the lifts at lunch and leave at five. Hotel guests check in in the evening and need their rooms cleaned in the morning. Cinema crowds spill into the shops nearby. The building is only as good as the transport that connects it, so the real game is designing the elevators.
Stars unlock as the population grows: hotels and housekeeping at two stars; escalators, express lifts, restaurants, shops, a cinema and parking at three; then a metro station, and finally a landmark at the top of a hundred-storey tower. On the way you'll handle fires, bomb threats, a very important guest who judges your suites, and rooms that turn infested if nobody cleans them.
Getting a tower off the ground
- Lobby, then a lift. Offices and apartments only let if people can reach them from the lobby. A shaft from floor 1 up through your first floors comes before almost anything else.
- Offices pay; apartments sell. Offices pay rent every quarter. An apartment pays once when it sells, and you give the money back if the owners leave.
- Watch the queues at eight and noon. That's when stress builds. Add cars to a busy shaft before adding another shaft.
- Sky lobbies every 15 floors. Express lifts stop only at lobby floors, so a tall tower is a set of express trunks with local lifts above each sky lobby.
- Keep noisy things away from bedrooms. Restaurants and shops next to apartments or hotel rooms annoy the people living there.
- Use the Mood view. It shows exactly which tenants are about to leave, before they do.
Frequently asked questions
Is this SimTower?
No. Skyrise is an original game written from scratch for this site, in the same genre as the tower simulators of the 1990s such as SimTower (1994) and Yoot Tower (1998). It contains no code, art, sound or text from either, and it is not affiliated with Maxis, Electronic Arts, OPeNBooK or Sega. It was built from a written description of how the genre plays, kept separate from the original games. See the provenance notice.
Do I need to download anything?
No. Skyrise is plain JavaScript that runs in the page, with no emulator and no game files to supply. It loads in about a second and works on a phone.
Why are my tenants moving out?
Almost always the elevators. People get stressed waiting and riding, and a tenant who stays unhappy for a whole day leaves. Use the Mood view to find the red floors, then add cars to that lift, add a second shaft, or move busy tenants nearer the lobby.
Can I save my tower?
Yes. It autosaves every game day, and the ☰ menu has a manual save and load. Saves are kept in this browser on this device.
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Want a game like this on your own site?
Eleven of the games here we wrote from scratch, and those are free for anyone to put on their own page: one line of HTML, no account, no permission, no attribution beyond a credit line.
Put Skyrise on your own site
This one is ours — written from scratch, not emulated — so you are welcome to embed it anywhere, free, with no permission needed. Paste this where you want it:
Keeping the credit line is the only thing we ask. Games we host but did not write are not offered for embedding, because those are not ours to hand on.