Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-6122870-20140318163542/@comment-4961229-20140504235800

Actually, no. The titanic struggle up a tower is older than video games or anime/manga. J.G. Ballard's protagonist in the 1975 novel, High Rise, fights his way up the stories in a skycraper gone crazy to the top. It's been done before. There's nothing new under the sun. Hell, Ringworld,  1970 science fiction novel  by  Larry Niven was a lot like this trope of fighting your way up a tower, even though the author renders the concept as a ring around a star, instead of a tower. Riverworld anybody? And how could I forget, the epic poem, Dante's Divine Comedy, written by Dante Alighieri between c. 1308 - 1321 could be considered the maker of this trope. Niven also did a novel on Dante's Hell called Inferno in 1976 which gave a more modern twist. I'm sure you could find many examples all throughout mythology as well.