What led to this being possible: There was recently a discussion about elevators on Hacker News, and somebody mentioned SimTower and asked about the algorithms it used, so I gave Yoot a call to ask him, and he mentioned he wanted to open source it. I enthusiastically agreed to help him, and contribute my efforts porting the code and navigating the licensing and trademark issues, benefiting from my experience developing the open source version of SimCity for the OLPC:
>I know Yoot Saito (creator of SimTower) from my time at Maxis, so I just gave him a cold call out of the blue and asked. ;) I caught him drinking Jack Daniels in a Japanese bar, but he had some time to chat.
>He said he once did a big interview with BBC about SimTower (which would be worth looking up and watching if you can find it), and had a friend who worked in the elevator industry, who told him generally about how elevators worked, but much of it was secret and proprietary, so he had to come up with how they worked in the game himself, based on the general ideas he learned and his own experience and imagination.
>He also said he's interested in releasing the original source code of SimTower as free open source software, like I did with the original SimCity Classic source code, so I volunteered to help him and find other people who could help. Anybody interested? ;)
Yoot recently sent me a huge code drop of the Windows sources as well as the Gameboy SP and DS versions and production documents, and I'm sorting it out and cleaning it up to make a version that compiles with emscripten and runs in the web browser. We've decided it release it under the MIT license, and develop a version that runs in the web browser using emscripten and SvelteKit. I'd appreciate hearing from people who are interested in helping out, especially people who know Japanese, since there is a lot of great content in The Tower II that was only released in Japan that needs translating to English and other languages.
I've also started the process of porting the Micropolis (open source SimCity) code to run in the web browser in the same way as Yoot Tower, since they are both from the same era (and from Maxis) and share a lot of technologies and requirements, so they will both be able to share much of the code and infrastructure (WebAssembly, emscripten, embind, SvelteKit, canvas, html, css, user interface code, github actions, etc), with the eventual goal of being able to embed multiple Yoot Towers in your Micropolis city!
>Open Source Micropolis, based on the original SimCity Classic from Maxis, by Will Wright.
>MicropolisCore C++ Core
>This is the source code for Micropolis (based on SimCity), released under GPL-3. Micropolis is based on the original SimCity from Electronic Arts / Maxis, designed and written by Will Wright, and ported to Unix by Don Hopkins.
>The origin of this repo is the "MicropolisCore" directory of the full micropolis repo, https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis , but it's been stripped down and simplified.
>I am now in the process of converting it to build for WebAssembly with emscripten and bind to JavaScript with embind, and implementing a SvelteKit front-end.
Since I know the SimCity code well already and have ported it to many different platforms, and put years of effort into cleaning up the old code to be well organized C++ code with clean interfaces and doxygen documentation, it's a great way to learn the new technologies, work out the approach, and prepare for porting SimTower the same way.
ChatGPT has been a huge help, especially analyzing the code and writing documentation and translating the Japanese comments, and now I'm using Aider for them both:
Aider: AI pair programming in your terminal (github.com/paul-gauthier):
Here's a code map for each source file that I made with ChatGPT that focuses on helping me get a high level view of the code, its dependencies, purposes of each file, and porting issues:
The Nintendo Gameboy SP and DS versions of Tower have a whole lot of proprietary Nintendo SDK code and also their precious proprietary content and characters like Mario, which we are certainly not able to release ourselves under the MIT license, so I'm working with the more generic Windows version instead. Yoot owns the rights to the source code to his own games, but we can't just release stuff with Nintendo's crowned jewels like Mario and their SDKs in it as open source.
We are being extremely careful not to infringe on anyone’s copyrights or trademarks, of course! Maxis got into a lot of trouble with Godzilla just because they had a big monster on the box but didn’t mention Godzilla by name (but a review in a magazine did, which was too much), and Maxis (now EA) own the SimTower trademark, so we’re calling it Yoot Tower. The Nintendo Gameboy and DS console ports of SimTower have a lot Nintendo content (like Mario), so we definitely don’t want to make Nintendo or EA mad by infringing on their trademarks or copyrights.
Jeff Braun (CEO of Maxis) told me the story of what happened decades ago with Maxis and Godzilla, so I want to be careful to avoid stomping on anybody’s property:
>Maxis was sued by Toho. We never referred to the name Godzilla, our monster on the box cover was a T-Rex looking character, but... a few magazine reviews called the monster, Godzilla. That was all it took. Toho called it "confusion in the marketplace". We paid $50k for Godzilla to go away. In all honesty, Toho liked Maxis, they said $50k was the minimum they take for Godzilla infringement. I doubt you will need to worry about Toho, as long as there are no magazine reviews that call the monster Godzilla.
I guess the lesson is to always make sure to give your monsters a unique name, and don’t leave that up to the user’s imagination.
> Anybody want to help, or know somebody who does, please? ;)
SimTower and Yoot Tower are some of my favorite games. Not sure if this is what you're looking for, but I'd be interested in working on fixing up the C backend and doing a new interface (probably either in Qt or SDL+Dear ImGui). I tried doing an Emscripten version of one of my other projects (https://github.com/ndiddy99/openmadoola) but found that it required restructuring the code to work with the "browser calls your loop" paradigm, and after I did that there was significantly worse input lag than running natively, which made the game less fun to play. I ended up scrapping the whole thing.
It's different for console games Madoola that are already low level and efficient and interacting directly with the hardware, but The Tower code needs to be de-windowsified (like I de-macified the SimCity code), because trying to add a layer of Windows emulation without restructuring the code is always going to be much slower and laggier (and vastly worse user experience) than stripping down the code to its essentials without any user interface, and then layering a new user interface on top of it.
It should be easy to compile the stripped down gui-less MicropolisEngine and YootTowerEngine with a native C++ compiler and make a new desktop user interface to it, once the work of stripping it down and removing the user interface code and replacing it with abstract interfaces is done. After I did that with the SimCity/Micropolis code, I integrated it with Python using SWIG, and wrote a PyGTK interface, and also a Python web server based interface that ran the user interface in the web browser with OpenLaszlo/Flash, communicating via AMF.
I want to push as much of the user interface out of the engine and into JavaScript/HTML/Canvas/SvelteKit as possible, since it's so much easier to make much better more advanced user interfaces with a modern stack than trying to deal with a crufty Windows emulation layer, and make improvements to that kind of code.
One thing I want to do is to make both Micropolis and Tower able to export lots of raw and cooked data, telemetry, and events, so I can use d3, Grafana, and other off-the-shelf data visualization tools to analyze and display the game state and history.
A couple decades ago an Earth Science professor Upmanu Lall at Columbia University proposed a great idea about developing an educational version of SimCity to use in his classes aimed at engaging students from other departments and getting them interested in data analysis and science. He wanted SimCity to simply be able to export spreadsheets of data, and have the students perform experiments and analyze the data using standard tools like Excel. A game like SimCity or SimTower would be an engaging way to pique the student's interest, that they could relate to, and motivate and teach a general literacy and understanding of spreadsheets and data analysis and visualization tools!
Here's the Educational SimCity proposal I wrote, but it didn't go anywhere until many years later when we finally talked EA into relicensing SimCity under GPL-3 for the One Laptop per Child project.
>Educational Multi Player SimCity for Linux Proposal
>Back in March 2002, Maxis told me they were interested in supporting the educational use of products like SimCity. Earlier, I had developed a multi player version of SimCity, which runs on Linux/X11, and was scriptable in TCL. Educators and researchers from Columbia University, MIT, IBM, Xerox and other educational and commercial institutions were excited about gaining access to this version of SimCity, and adapting it to teach and stimulate students' interest in urban planning, computer simulation and game programming.
>So I wrote this proposal and presented it to Maxis. Maxis was quite enthusiastic about the idea, invited me in to discuss it, and said they would write up a contract which enabled me to distribute Multi Player SimCity for Linux, and adapt it to the needs of our educational users.
>Unfortunately, it's been almost two years since I sent the proposal, and I have never heard anything back from Maxis about this project. The software still exists, works very well, and is ready to distribute. But I can't distribute this Educationally Oriented Multi Player SimCity for Linux, until I hear back from Maxis about the contract. Despite my repeated email and phone messages asking about the status, Maxis never got back to me about this, or offered any explaination. So as far as I know, it's still tied up at EA Legal. I still wonder if they dropped the ball, or if they will finally come through after two years.
>SimCity.edu Proposal to Maxis
>Don Hopkins ported SimCity to Unix in 1991, working as a contractor for DUX Software, who licensed it from Maxis for a ten-year duration. He developed a cooperative networked multi player version of SimCity, released in 1993. He subsequently worked with Will Wright for Maxis/EA, developing The Sims character animation system, content pipeline, programming tools and user interface. Hopkins ported SimCity to Linux and optimized it, so it's a viable product as well as an engaging educational tool.
>Hopkins has demonstrated Multi Player SimCity at ACM's InterCHI Conference, IBM's New Paradigms Workshop, the Exploratorium's Multimedia Playground, Interval's Electric Carnival, BayCHI at Xerox PARC, and MIT Media Lab's corporate sponsors meeting. Audiences are consistently excited about the possibilities of using SimCity educationally.
>The ten-year contract between Maxis and DUX Software to distribute the Unix version of SimCity has expired, so it's not currently available as a product. Hopkins would like to license the rights from Maxis/EA directly, to develop an educational version of SimCity Classic. It can be distributed and played over the Internet like the popular ActiveX SimCity Classic, and extended to support educational uses.
>Columbia University uses SimCity and SimEarth to help teach Civil and Environmental Engineering. They are actively redesigning the curriculum to incorporate simulation games like SimCity and SimEarth, as well as developing a new simulation platform. Professor Upmanu Lall has applied for an NFS grant to develop an open system called OPTIMUS (Open Platform for Teaching Integrated Modeling and Urban Simulation). Don Hopkins is collaborating with Columbia University to develop simulation tools for education and research.
>The educators at Columbia University are excited about and willing to financially support the development of educational versions of SimCity and SimEarth. Hopkins hopes to make Multi Player SimCity for Linux available at low cost for educational use, while also selling it commercially to the small but enthusiastic Linux gaming community. The NFS grant can fund the development of the current Multi Player SimCity Classic into an educational tool, for Columbia and other universities to use in their Civil and Environmental Engineering curricula.
>This project doesn't require funding or work from Maxis/EA, and will support itself by generating a positive stream of royalties from commercial sales. The long-term benefits to Maxis, EA and society are quite positive: Columbia University will measure the effect of SimCity and other simulation tools on their goals of improving student enrolment and test scores. They will publish the results at conferences and in research papers, and make them available for other schools to use.
>Maxis's intellectual property and time will be protected, because Hopkins will insulate Columbia from the SimCity source code, and will also insulate Maxis from supporting the educational version of SimCity. Multi Player SimCity is already extensible through the TCL/Tk scripting language, and Hopkins will provide the hooks necessary for Columbia to use SimCity educationally, though scripting languages and component technology, without releasing any proprietary Maxis source code.
>The initial proposal is for Hopkins and Maxis/EA to enter into a contract granting Hopkins the right to commercially develop and distribute SimCity Classic, and also possibly SimEarth. Hopkins will further develop the software for Columbia University's educational use (at no expense to Maxis or EA), with the overall design subject to the approval of Maxis and EA. Maxis/EA will receive royalties on all sales of the product, and will also receive proper credit for its educational uses. This proposal is a rough draft, to start a dialog toward an agreement that will benefit everyone.
Would it be possible to put the original Sim Tower/Yoot Tower code up as well as the Web version? I know people who are interested in porting out some of the Mac DLC to Windows platforms in particular
Once we get it cleaned up and have added MIT licensing and copyright notices to the code, it should be possible to build and release the Windows sources, but the Nintendo Gameboy sources are chock full of proprietary Nintendo stuff. I would love to release a Windows build that fixes the save crashing bug that LGR encountered in his excellent video about Yoot Tower. He says the Mac version was rock solid but the Window version crashed. But I don't have the Mac code, just the Windows.
>My Mac: When you developed YOOT TOWER and were preparing it for release, you made it very clear that you wanted the Mac version to appear first before the Windows version. Why did you do so and what resistance did you encounter?
>Mr. Saito: In making the initial prototypes, the Mac was a great sketchbook. However, in America, much more so than in Japan there is a lot of skepticism toward the Mac market. That was a very difficult point from a marketing angle.
>Yutaka Saitou was at one point considered a Mac Evangelist. He published "Under the Apple Tree" (Ringo no ki no shita de, 林檎の樹の下で) which details the turbulent events between the first Apple computer being imported into Japan and Apple Japan being established. He also published "The Secrets of Macintosh's creation" (Makkintosshu Tanjou no Hiwa, マッキントッシュ誕生の秘話), which features interviews with both the founding members and other core developers.
>Yoot Saito was previously best known as a Mac-focused developer who created The Tower, a tower management game that SimCity studio Maxis released worldwide as SimTower. (Its sequel, The Tower II, came to be known as Yoot Tower outside Japan.) After Seaman and its PS2 sequel, Saito designed Odama, a pinball-strategy hybrid for the GameCube where players used voice commands to direct soldiers on the table.
>On Commodore 64, “Micropolis” had been a full-screen game controlled entirely with a keyboard and its palette of tools was laid out at the bottom of the screen. On Mac, it became a windowed application with mouse control, a MacPaint-inspired tool palette and menu system, and a separate window for the mini-map. It was, in essence, an interactive paint program — a MacPaint for city building. As the player painted her city on the canvas, its population would fall and rise and its visual appearance would evolve before her eyes. Its roads would come to life with traffic, its busiest districts patrolled by a helicopter, and its residents would build (or sometimes abandon) homes and businesses. [...]
>SimCity made a particularly great impact on Japanese Macintosh enthusiast Yutaka “Yoot” Saito. He felt the Nintendo Entertainment System games he had played before SimCity were more suitable for kids. They had bright, colorful graphics and animation and cute, synthesized sounds, and they tended to be fast-paced. What they lacked in sophistication they made up for in loudness — in frantic button presses and lots of on-screen action. SimCity seemed totally different. It was visually very static, and it wasn’t even displayed in color.
>Above: Yoot Tower, the pseudo-sequel to SimTower
>But Saito thought it was very smart. In its simple graphics he could imagine many rich and colorful scenes around a city. “I didn’t leave the Macintosh for almost twenty-four hours,” he recalls. “I so much admired who created this genius and crazy software.” SimCity had an aura not unlike the Mac itself. Saito had been attracted to the Mac’s revolutionary air soon after it first came out. Apple’s presence in Japan was tiny at the time, as Japanese computers such as the NEC PC-98 and MSX dominated, but he grew fascinated as he learnt more about the Mac through advertisements and magazine articles. It appealed to him as a charismatic counterculture, a kind of rock ‘n’ roll for his generation. He desperately wanted to be part of it.
>But it seemed so far away — almost unreachable. Neither the thriving online Mac shareware scene nor the Apple team and the excitement of all the top developers appearing at the Macworld Expo were at all accessible. Japan had a few Mac-centric magazines and a small (but growing) Macworld Expo in Tokyo, but with limited online access it was very much detached from the happenings elsewhere in the Macintosh world.
>In homage to SimCity’s brilliance, Saito decided to make his own simulation game for the Mac. Rather than asking the player to plan and manage a city, he opted for a single skyscraper.
>With an interface similar to SimCity, The Tower swapped residential blocks for condominiums and hotel suites; commercial zones for offices, restaurants, and shops; and industry for parking, medical centers, housekeeping and laundry facilities, recycling facilities, and the like. In place of roads and rail, it had stairs, escalators, and elevators. The goal was to build a hundred-floor tower with a five-star rating. To get there, the player divided her time between expanding the tower, managing elevator traffic and capacity, monitoring the happiness of tenants (their silhouettes turned increasingly red as their happiness decreased), and handling business affairs such as number of staff and cost of a room, office, or condo.
>The Tower took around three years to develop. It came out for Mac in Japan in 1994. “It became a kind of phenomenon,” Saito says. “I was introduced on a TV show and in some magazines.” He also received multiple offers to adapt the game for the console market. A short time later Saito heard from Jeff Braun, the president of SimCity publisher Maxis, who had been informed by Will Wright that his game was “interesting”. Maxis cut a deal for international publishing rights and re-released it as SimTower. Its international success didn’t match the celebrity scale of the Japanese release, but SimTower nonetheless became a bestseller and cult favorite.
Have you asked Mr Saito if they still have the Mac version in particular? A lot of the content seems specific depending on the platform it was released on. Getting everything archived would be great for preservation
I will ask him! It would be great to have the original Mac versions. There are some other weird versions like 3DO and Sega Saturn, but I'm afraid they may be lost in the sands to time. I'm collaborating with some game archivists (like Phil Salvador, who wrote the article about SimRefinery that led to its recovery, and his Video Game History Foundation), and Olde Sküül game developers Rebecca Heineman, who can help preserve the original sources, and even recover the original tools and SDKs and get them to build, so people can study and build and renovate the original sources.
I played a big game of Project Highrise (and of SimTower too) just recently, to immerse myself in the games and make them fresh in my mind before working on porting. I think Project Highrise is great! But in the same way I also appreciate the original SimCity 8-bit pixel graphics, and low-tech graphics in The Sims 1, I think SimTower still stands on its own as a game that can still be thoroughly enjoyed.
Especially once we develop an SDK to enable user created content, that lets you add your own rooms and people, and program them with JavaScript, thanks to the way emscripten + embind lets you subclass and implement C++ classes in JavaScript, calling back and forth between the core C++ game engine and the JavaScript user interface and plug-ins.
The YootTower repo README quotes some info about TowerKit that was used to develop many expansion packs for The Tower II that were only released in Japan, and I plan on making a more flexible modern version of TowerKit in the form of a Yoot Tower SDK that lets you dynamically script and download extensions in JavaScript instead of modifying and recompiling C++ code.
>Tower Kit is optional software for The Tower II. In The Tower II, you can select the stage where you want to start the game using the concept of a "map." The Tower II package comes with three maps: "Shinjuku Subcenter," "Hawaii Diamond Head," and "Kegon Falls," and the "Tower Kit" adds these maps. By installing this tower kit, a new stage game will begin. Tower kits don't just add more stages. Each map has new features, allowing you to play a completely new game.
>Please try the "Tower Kit" which allows for infinite variations.
>A love story between you, the person in charge of the Liberty Island redevelopment project, and two men and women who are your subordinates. Your work will have a subtle influence on the course of your love life. The Tower II is the first attempt at a crossover between redevelopment and love, set in New York. What is the ending...?
I did a similar thing for Micropolis/SimCity more than a decade ago, but with Python and SWIG, instead of emscripten and embind, so you could program your own agents (like PacBot, who follows the roads and eats traffic) and zones (like the Church of Pacmania, which worships and attracts PacBots, and causes lots of traffic to feed them).
A demo of the open source Micropolis Online game (based on the original SimCity Classic source code from Maxis), running on a web server, written in C++ and Python, and displaying in a web browser, written in OpenLaszlo and JavaScript, running in the Flash player. Developed by Don Hopkins.
Back when I was porting SimCity to Unix in the early 90's, Maxis gave me the source code to SimEarth too, but I never had the chance to port it, and don't have permission now unfortunately. I'd love to make a modern version of SimEarth and SimAnt too, but neither of them were as successful or engaging a game as SimCity. Will Wright discusses SimEarth, SimAnt, and SimCity 2000 in this 1996 talk he gave to Terry Winnograd's user interface class, and also demonstrates a very early version of The Sims when it was called Dollhouse. His point was that SimAnt was too simple, SimEarth was too complex, but SimCity 2000 was just right, and Dollhouse was the next thing he was working on, which became The Sims. I'd also love to make a modern version of The Sims 1, but I don't have permission for that either, and have never been able to talk anyone at EA to reproduce the miracle it took to release SimCity.
But I'm delighted and grateful to have the chance to work with Yoot Saito on SimTower instead, since he retained all the rights to his code, and we're both on the same page about educational games, constructionist education, and our respect for Alan Kay and Seymour Papert's philosophy about teaching kids to program and motivating it with games. A visual programming language in Micropolis and Yoot Tower would be great (that's the long term plan), like the SimAntics VPL in The Sims 1 (but much easier to use and extend).
Will Wright - Maxis - Interfacing to Microworlds - 1996-4-26:
Here's an article I wrote about that talk right after attending it, that I updated in later years after working with Will on The Sims, and then even more recently when Stanford finally published the video of the talk decades later:
https://github.com/YootTowerManagement/YootTower
What led to this being possible: There was recently a discussion about elevators on Hacker News, and somebody mentioned SimTower and asked about the algorithms it used, so I gave Yoot a call to ask him, and he mentioned he wanted to open source it. I enthusiastically agreed to help him, and contribute my efforts porting the code and navigating the licensing and trademark issues, benefiting from my experience developing the open source version of SimCity for the OLPC:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39087437
>I know Yoot Saito (creator of SimTower) from my time at Maxis, so I just gave him a cold call out of the blue and asked. ;) I caught him drinking Jack Daniels in a Japanese bar, but he had some time to chat.
>He said he once did a big interview with BBC about SimTower (which would be worth looking up and watching if you can find it), and had a friend who worked in the elevator industry, who told him generally about how elevators worked, but much of it was secret and proprietary, so he had to come up with how they worked in the game himself, based on the general ideas he learned and his own experience and imagination.
>He also said he's interested in releasing the original source code of SimTower as free open source software, like I did with the original SimCity Classic source code, so I volunteered to help him and find other people who could help. Anybody interested? ;)
Yoot recently sent me a huge code drop of the Windows sources as well as the Gameboy SP and DS versions and production documents, and I'm sorting it out and cleaning it up to make a version that compiles with emscripten and runs in the web browser. We've decided it release it under the MIT license, and develop a version that runs in the web browser using emscripten and SvelteKit. I'd appreciate hearing from people who are interested in helping out, especially people who know Japanese, since there is a lot of great content in The Tower II that was only released in Japan that needs translating to English and other languages.
I've also started the process of porting the Micropolis (open source SimCity) code to run in the web browser in the same way as Yoot Tower, since they are both from the same era (and from Maxis) and share a lot of technologies and requirements, so they will both be able to share much of the code and infrastructure (WebAssembly, emscripten, embind, SvelteKit, canvas, html, css, user interface code, github actions, etc), with the eventual goal of being able to embed multiple Yoot Towers in your Micropolis city!
https://github.com/SimHacker/MicropolisCore
>Open Source Micropolis, based on the original SimCity Classic from Maxis, by Will Wright.
>MicropolisCore C++ Core
>This is the source code for Micropolis (based on SimCity), released under GPL-3. Micropolis is based on the original SimCity from Electronic Arts / Maxis, designed and written by Will Wright, and ported to Unix by Don Hopkins.
>The origin of this repo is the "MicropolisCore" directory of the full micropolis repo, https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis , but it's been stripped down and simplified.
>I am now in the process of converting it to build for WebAssembly with emscripten and bind to JavaScript with embind, and implementing a SvelteKit front-end.
Since I know the SimCity code well already and have ported it to many different platforms, and put years of effort into cleaning up the old code to be well organized C++ code with clean interfaces and doxygen documentation, it's a great way to learn the new technologies, work out the approach, and prepare for porting SimTower the same way.
ChatGPT has been a huge help, especially analyzing the code and writing documentation and translating the Japanese comments, and now I'm using Aider for them both:
Aider: AI pair programming in your terminal (github.com/paul-gauthier):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39995725
Here's a code map for each source file that I made with ChatGPT that focuses on helping me get a high level view of the code, its dependencies, purposes of each file, and porting issues:
https://github.com/YootTowerManagement/YootTower/blob/main/Y...
The Nintendo Gameboy SP and DS versions of Tower have a whole lot of proprietary Nintendo SDK code and also their precious proprietary content and characters like Mario, which we are certainly not able to release ourselves under the MIT license, so I'm working with the more generic Windows version instead. Yoot owns the rights to the source code to his own games, but we can't just release stuff with Nintendo's crowned jewels like Mario and their SDKs in it as open source.
We are being extremely careful not to infringe on anyone’s copyrights or trademarks, of course! Maxis got into a lot of trouble with Godzilla just because they had a big monster on the box but didn’t mention Godzilla by name (but a review in a magazine did, which was too much), and Maxis (now EA) own the SimTower trademark, so we’re calling it Yoot Tower. The Nintendo Gameboy and DS console ports of SimTower have a lot Nintendo content (like Mario), so we definitely don’t want to make Nintendo or EA mad by infringing on their trademarks or copyrights.
Jeff Braun (CEO of Maxis) told me the story of what happened decades ago with Maxis and Godzilla, so I want to be careful to avoid stomping on anybody’s property:
>Maxis was sued by Toho. We never referred to the name Godzilla, our monster on the box cover was a T-Rex looking character, but... a few magazine reviews called the monster, Godzilla. That was all it took. Toho called it "confusion in the marketplace". We paid $50k for Godzilla to go away. In all honesty, Toho liked Maxis, they said $50k was the minimum they take for Godzilla infringement. I doubt you will need to worry about Toho, as long as there are no magazine reviews that call the monster Godzilla.
I guess the lesson is to always make sure to give your monsters a unique name, and don’t leave that up to the user’s imagination.