2006 Player One Limited
Platform: Mobile J2ME
A short entry for a Java Platform mobile conversion of a classic platformer title that many of us know and love. Nebulus (or Tower Toppler as known in other regions) was about to be playable on the go thanks to Player One Limited, who announced the game in 2006.
Being developed in J2ME, unfortunately the conversion would disappear quickly without a trace and never surfaced for reasons currently unknown.
Fast forward to 2024, and ex-Ocean Software artist Bill Harbison would provide Games That Weren’t with a series of mock-up screens that were produced to show how the game could look on the platform.
With the screens, you can see that the general style was mostly kept, though the main character had been changed. Also – the sideways scrolling bonus level was seemingly replaced by a top down shooting round.
It isn’t yet known if development of the game itself was ever started and progressed beyond these mock-ups. We hope to learn more from Bill soon and if there might be something playable out there to some day recover.
Thanks to contributor Pedro Pimenta, we learn that there was an unofficial mobile game a few years earlier called The Tower Toppler, but nothing official it seems.
If you know anything more about the game, then please do get in touch.
With thanks to Bill Harbison for providing the mock-up graphics to include on the site and Pedro Pimenta for the heads up about the unofficial mobile game.
Gallery
I really like the aesthetic, particularly small details like the screw threads and having the player character wearing an environmental suit, as well as the really cool score display. It’s neat how visual changes like those can make an old classic feel fresh again.
It’s been ages but I’m pretty sure I had a version on my N-Gage in the mid-00s that IIRC used the same graphics as the Amiga/Atari ST, though with the sky on the sides cut off.
Thanks Michael – it’s a shame that it seemingly didn’t get to a playable state. That’s interesting too about the potential N-Gage version too, though i’ve just learnt thanks to Pedro Pimenta that there was an unofficial mobile version – so may have been that?
Yea, it probably was the mobile version. I don’t have a clear memory of which games I played were N-Gage exclusives, but for the sake of mobile gamers at the time I hope Nebulus was available on all Symbian devices. It’s certainly a game that deserves to be enjoyed by many. It’s one I always come back to every few years as the gameplay is simple but timeless, and every port I’ve seen has been very well done.