My best run in the original Icy Tower died somewhere short of floor 300, and for years I blamed the keyboard (it was not the keyboard). Now its creators have rebuilt the whole thing. Johan Peitz and Anders Svensson, who made the 2001 freeware game, announced a full remake of Icy Tower on October 28 with publisher Apskeppet. It launches on November 10, 2026, on PC and Mac through Steam, for $11.99.
The 2001 version came from Free Lunch Design, a Swedish studio. Peitz designed it and Svensson wrote the music, and it came out on December 22, 2001, as a free download for Windows. Everything in it was about one tower and one rule. You jump up an endless stack of floors while the climb speeds up, and if you fall off the bottom, you start again. Jumping several floors at once chains a combo, and combos are where the score lives.
How a free tower reached 40 million players
Icy Tower spread the way freeware did then, through download sites and word of mouth. It sat high on Download.com’s charts, and by 2008 the downloads were estimated at more than 11 million, according to Wikipedia’s history of the game. It was biggest in the Czech Republic, Germany and Poland, where players met up in person in Kraków and Warsaw. The original saved replays, and online high score tables could ask for one as proof. The announcement now puts the total at more than 40 million players since 2001.
The game never went away so much as split into versions. Icy Tower 2 reached iOS and Android in 2012, and there were Facebook, mobile and “Classic” editions along the way. The remake reunites Peitz and Svensson, who made games together in the early 2000s.
The core has not moved. Harold the Homeboy and friends do the climbing, the combo jumps and wall bounces are still the point, and one mistake still sends you back to the bottom. Around that, the remake adds themed stretches of tower, from ancient temples to libraries and volcanoes. It also adds Daily Challenges with odd modifiers, a cast of characters with their own looks and sounds, and live-recorded music. Steam leaderboards replace the old score tables, and you can watch replays from friends and top players.
“We’re super proud of the new version and are sure it will delight old fans as well as new ones,” Peitz and Svensson said. Old fans will notice the price first. The original cost nothing. The remake asks $11.99, so it has to earn that with the daily modes and the leaderboards, because the jump itself was always free.
It is single-player and English-only on the Steam page, where you can wishlist it now. I will be back short of floor 300 by November 11, blaming a different keyboard.
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