Who owns Tower? Who built it and how long has it stood for? What goes on with their finances? Where do my units go? It’s a private resort, but who owns it? What did they do with Lobby 1? How did our players get here? Are our lives in Tower Unite directly connected from the ones we left behind in GMTower? Did we swap over? What is our purpose? Did we have a life beforehand? Was our character perhaps escaping from the mundane fixtures of modern life? Did they take the next train to “whatever-just-get-me-out-of-here-land” Or is that what we, ourselves, our real life beings are doing when we click that sensuous ‘Play’ button on our Steam dashboards, why do we find it necessary to have the condo design that we feel defines us as an individual? Is it programmed in to our player’s goals, or is it our own personal goal? How can you be sure that person you talked to on minigolf was real? a steam profile never really proves much, I’ve known so many people in my time here, and lost so many people at the same time. Did you ever stop to think about how many people you’ve met on this game, befriended them, played with them for so long and just one day lost touch? What do you think that’s doing to your character? What’s it even doing to you? Am I losing touch? Is this my perfect alternative reality? Where I’m supposed to be who I want to be? and lastly how did I become this Milk Carton?
These questions are great philisophical questions, and i’ll try my best to answer as much as I possibly can with one statement. After all, thats what philosophy is for, right?
I feel like tower’s lore is simple, the players are versions of ourselfes where we can do almost whatever we want, without paying a dime. Like play minigolf, play trivia, or laser tag. This world is clearly a utopian vision of our own world, where money need not apply. At least at first. Money will always slip into any utopia, and it did, in form of stuff like casino, condo, and stores. You earn money, called units, from the utopian parts of tower, and spend it on dystopian features.
So in conclusion, tower is a Utopian version of our world, with a slight dystopian features.
(Also, to answer one of the other questions, How can we know if anyone is real? Steam or not? The movie “The Matrix” touches upon this perfectly. I would recommend looking for “the philosophy of the matrix” on youtube.)
The entire Tower universe is an entity in itself, comprised in turn of possibly an infinite number of other pocket dimensions (the Condos are a notable example) so no individual or group actually owns it, even though a handful of people are vaguely aware of the way things change and unfold in this place, and can prevent it from devolving into some sort of chaotic nightmare to some extent (I’ll come back to that in a moment). You could assume it was first created when Lobby 1 “came out” even though this topic is still open to debate because we’re talking about universes here and I’m pretty shit at handling the subject.
For the most part, the Tower evolves by itself: it constantly makes, unmakes and remakes its own structure and layout on different levels, from changing the species of that one tree in the plaza to a complete “redesign” of it, like the transition from Lobby 1 to Lobby 2. While some changes can be really extreme, it appears the Tower can’t fully transform itself into a radically different entity without making it a very slow but also understandable process that can be easily influenced: in other words, the Tower can retain its general form.
Then you have the handful of people I was talking about earlier, who have a certain grasp of what’s happening and can decide on the purpose of the structures and layouts the Tower makes. But how did they find the Tower in the first place, you ask? Some say they transcended to a higher plane of existence (or lower, you decide) and managed to open a passage to our world from there.
This is where us, the “players”, come into play. Part of the money we spend to buy our ticket to the Tower universe (i.e the game on Steam) is converted into an amount of Units, the currency used in the universe. Unless you find a way to enter the Tower universe like the first people did, you can’t directly interact with everything and everyone in there, so instead it’s just a projection of yourself, which you can change your appearance as you please if the Tower allows it.
I spent way too much time on this and I’m pretty sure most of it doesn’t make sense at all because my english is terrible
It’s really fascinating to see and come up with lore on Tower as a whole, which in the past on the old forums and on the Gmod server itself people would talk about how Tower is where we go when we die, or just a utopian universe controlled by a select few (The Devs) as is mentioned in ways above.
Though when it came to the transitioning between Lobby 1 and Lobby 2 I liked to think we all got on that old subway car, to a train station inbetween the planes of existance, to get onto that sleek Lobby 2 train and head to Lobby 2 in some other plane of existance. Or the idea both planes could not exist at the same time, so as Lobby 2 was being consturcted, Lobby 1 was being deconstructed.
To be honest, @Computerman and I have been talking about this for a while; we have some pretty interesting ideas but I will not post it here, yet. Not everything is fleshed out but expect to see something pretty in depth on these forums within the coming months…
Tower Unite is heaven, an illusion to all who have passed. “Rob” (the owner of Rob’s Imports) is the god of this world. His goal is to make sure nobody knows they are dead and that they have a good ass time. (The devs said this btw… Well most of it.)
EDIT:
[quote=“Zak, post:4, topic:425”]
The lore is that Tower is literally heaven.
Everyone thinks they’re on some kind of fun vacation getaway, when really they’re dead.The wandering merchant is Lucifer. He’s the one who instantiated capitalism in Tower, tainting an otherwise perfect paradise.
Tower Unite is just like ARK from Soma. If you don’t know what ARK is: it’s a VR utopia that was meant to save humanity by doing bioscans of them and sending them into that utopia and letting humans “live” in it. And also somebody wanted to launch it into outer space, I don’t know why. So yeah, let’s just pretend that TU is ARK.
So we play real life in tower unite and open tower unite in real life and play a game in a game. Maybe when I stop playing this addicting real life game I can enjoy tower unite for what it really is.
Honestly, I picture it as an afterlife, think about it. You can’t die, The condos have beaches despite being in a tower, theres magic teleporters everywhere, and you can play games where you’re, trapped in a ball, turned into a golfball, and given weapons and forced to fight off zombies then being fine seconds later.
(The devs said this btw… Well most of it.)