Game launches seven months early by mistake

A video game was mistakenly released seven months before its launch yesterday, available on Steam to anyone for about 6 hours before the developers got matters straightened out with Valve.

The game in question is The Tower (pictured), a dungeon crawler for Windows PC due to arrive in early winter 2015. Its alpha has been on Steam early Access with the usual caveats about being an incomplete build. Apparently the whole thing went public early Friday morning.

Dante Knoxx, the game's lead designer, blamed the mistake on a new moderator who had been given access to the game "so I could concentrate on working flat-out and remove some of the community strain from my work load, and the fool has released us seven months early!!"

Knoxx feared that the release to a wide number of people "may actually have [irreversibly] damaged something," but apparently that isn't the case. Yesterday afternoon the game was taken off Steam — and restored to its proper Early Access availability — with no problems.

The Tower: 2015 Edition is a reboot of a 2012 edition of the game, in which the player is wrongfully imprisoned in an 11-century prison and must escape. The player navigates his way solely with localized sounds; combat is tougher, and with the threat of permadeath, stealth is the preferred means of escape. The game is meant to be difficult, taking inspiration from Dark Souls.