Rebellion has announced Evil Genius 2 – 13 years after the launch of the original.
Rebellion CEO Jason Kingsley has announced that the British developer is now starting work on Evil Genius 2.
Fans of the first game will be pleased to hear that Evil Genius 2 will be a fully fledged sequel for PC – and won’t be free-to-play. While it’s still at the very early stages, Rebellion has confirmed that it will be the first real-time strategy game built in their Asura engine.
Real-time strategy game Evil Genius was released in September 2004, developed by Elixir Studios and published by Sierra Entertainment. Set in an alternate 1960s/70s universe, it was inspired by James Bond style spy thrillers. The player took on the role of an evil mastermind, creating a secret underground lair and managing a horde of minions and henchmen. Similar to Dungeon Keeper, the aim is to achieve world domination and create the ultimate doomsday device. Despite its age, Evil Genius still maintains an Overwhelmingly Positive score on Steam – over 95% of its 1196 reviews are positive.
Rebellion Developments has owned the intellectual property rights of the game since 2006, and fans had been hoping ever since that a sequel was in the pipeline.
From the recent press release:
You may well be asking why it’s taken us a while to get to this point. As some of you may remember, we were very close to announcing this project several years ago. Back then, our plan was to crowd-fund a new Evil Genius PC game and we made a series of steps to launching a campaign.
So why didn’t we go ahead with it? Firstly, we were in the middle of a big transition into becoming our own publisher and we needed to put resources into the projects that became Zombie Army Trilogy, Battlezone on PSVR and Sniper Elite 3 & 4.
Secondly, we decided crowd-funding wasn’t the way we wanted to go. After the growing success of the Sniper Elite series and other Rebellion games IP, we started to feel it wasn’t fair to ask fans to fund a new game if we didn’t need them to! With some big projects now out the door and being enjoyed by gamers worldwide, we feel like now is the time to return to the world of Evil Genius.
So yes, it’s taken us some time to get to this point. But today we are in a position where we can happily say Evil Genius 2 is an actual thing we’re actually coding, designing and er… arting, right now!
The announcement was tacked at the end of a ‘state of Rebellion’ announcement and starts at around the 3:37 mark in the video below.
Evil Genius 2 will be coming to PC, built on the Asura engine. Release date TBC.
