How many floors can you fall? Shaft Drop — 100 floors, a squad of three, one door

In a real high-rise evacuation, people average roughly a floor every 15–20 seconds on the stairs. In this game the building is collapsing above you, every floor has gaps and furniture in it, and safety is the bunker 50 floors down. Get there and the run isn't over: the fallout-shelter hatch below takes three runners to open — one on each wheel — and behind it wait 50 darker, meaner floors. Pick your squad of three, steer, shove, hop and drop.

The real number: a floor every 15–20 seconds

After the 2001 World Trade Center evacuation, NIST (the US National Institute of Standards and Technology) ran the largest study of high-rise egress ever attempted, interviewing hundreds of survivors for its NCSTAR 1-7 report (published 2005). The headline finding: people descended far slower than fire models had assumed — an average of about 0.2 metres per second of vertical drop on the stairs. With a typical office storey at 3–4 metres, that works out to roughly one floor every 15–20 seconds, before counting congestion, rest stops, or counterflow from firefighters climbing the same stairs.

A hundred floors at that pace is nearly half an hour. Your best Shaft Drop run will be a couple of minutes — which is the point. Falling is the only way down that fast, and the game is about controlling a fall.

The other direction: 86 flights, 9 minutes 33 seconds

The benchmark for moving through a tower under your own power is the Empire State Building Run-Up — a race up 86 flights and 1,576 steps to the observation deck, held since 1978. The men's record of 9 minutes 33 seconds was set by Australian cyclist-turned-stair-racer Paul Crake in 2003 and has stood for over two decades. Going up costs muscle; going down costs your knees and your nerve — competitive stair racing almost never descends, because a missed step downward at speed is a genuine fall.

How the game works (and why)

Shaft Drop belongs to a lineage of descent games that goes back to 1990s Japanese freeware — the best-known ancestor being NS-SHAFT, where you hop down an endless pit of moving platforms. The design insight those games found is the one this game runs on: falling is free, but aiming a fall is a skill. Every floor has one or two gaps that jump from side to side so you're always traversing. Furniture — crates, sofas and safes, weighted one to three dots — parks itself in your path: strong runners shove it (shove it into a gap and it tumbles into the dark), and any runner can hop onto it and walk over the top, so nobody is ever trapped. Amber express stairwells every few floors carry you down two storeys at once. And the collapse line above you rubber-bands: it never lets you coast, and it never makes a good run impossible.

The run has two acts. Floor 50 is the bunker — a genuine rest stop where the clock pauses, your squad eats, and a posted sign explains the door problem: the fallout-shelter hatch needs a runner standing on each of three wheel pads. You switch control between your three monsters (tap one, or press 1, 2, 3), man the wheels, and the hatch grinds open. Then the choice that makes the game: bank the Bunker Badge and finish, or send your leader down into the Dark Levels — floors 51 to 100, with tighter gaps, heavier furniture and a faster collapse — chasing the Shelter Badge. Push-your-luck is the oldest trick in game design, and it's the reason "one more run" works.

The Daily Shaft

Every run is procedurally generated, but in Daily mode the generator is seeded from today's date — so everyone on Earth plays the identical building each day, both stages, and your time actually means something against your friends'. There's a share button on the end screen for exactly that argument. Practice mode stays fully random for warming up. A random layout tests your reactions; a fixed daily layout rewards learning the building — the game gives you both.

The runners — including yours

Every runner trades off five stats: horizontal speed, fall weight, body size, a one-hit shield, and strength. Strength is the furniture stat — one-dot Zippy hops over the office safe, three-dot Boulder shoves it into a gap. Wisp can't push anything but rides the express stairwells faster than anyone. And if you've built creatures in our Monster Maker on this device, they appear automatically under the My creatures tab — searchable and sortable even if your collection runs to the hundreds. Their card stats carry over: SPD becomes run speed, HP becomes body size, DEF of 75+ earns the cave-in shield, ATK sets shove strength and stairwell speed. Better still, the loop runs both ways: when your squad rests in the bunker, imported creatures are genuinely fed — the game writes +1 affection back into their Monster Maker save.

Real evacuees manage a floor every 15 seconds. The collapse gives you about one — and the last door takes three of you. See you in the shelter.