Rebellion announces they are currently developing Evil Genius 2, an official sequel to the highly regarded 2004 strategy game that put the player in the role of the bad guy. This is a long time coming, as we learned eight years ago that Rebellion had picked up the Evil Genius IP somewhere along the way. Original developer Elixir actually first announced an Evil Genius sequel in 2004, but this obviously did not work out. Here's word on their plans, including an explanation of why they are not taking this through a crowdfunding process:

We know you’ve been waiting a long time for this announcement, so we won’t tantalize you any further. As revealed in our new video interview with Rebellion CEO Jason Kingsley (we suggest giving it a watch) we’re thrilled to announce we are now officially working on Evil Genius 2.

Ever since Evil Genius came under the Rebellion roof, we’ve always believed that Elixir’s beloved real-time, lair-management and world-domination simulation deserved a follow-up. We’d like to make this super-duper clear – this isn’t a remaster. Evil Genius 2 will be a fully-fledged sequel and it won’t be free-to-play. Our focus currently is on a PC release, but as ever we’ll look at other platforms and see what fits and what doesn’t.

THE STATE OF PLAY
Now, before you get too excited and start furiously drawing up your blueprints for a Gravity Disruptor 2.0, development only began this Spring and is still at a very, very early stage. We’re currently fleshing out the tech that will make Evil Genius 2 a reality. This will be the first real-time strategy game built in our in-house engine Asura, after all, so we need to do a little bit of extra work under the hood before we expand the team, nail down gameplay design and go into full production.

WHY NOW?
That said, 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!