![]() Spacebase Startopia looks so delightfully and overwhelmingly alien.īut what's it like getting to work on a series that's so old and beloved? Incredibly daunting, says Evil Genius 2's lead designer Rich Edwards. "And our team are huge sci-fi fans, so that pretty much sealed the deal." "For us, it was always something worthy of a spiritual sequel, and since both Dungeons 3 and Spacebase Startopia are hybrid strategy-management games, we knew that we already had a good foundation to work from," he says. Realmforge previously made Dungeons, a series inspired by 1997's Dungeon Keeper, which creative director Christian Wolfertstetter tells me was part of their reason for picking up another oldie in Startopia. Spacebase Startopia art director Anika Linke tells me she recognised how prominent management games currently were after they'd already started developing their game too. All of those big hitters have come out and really enforced to us that we were doing the right thing at the right time." "We've had the pleasure of developing our game alongside the releases of Two Point Hospital, Jurassic World Evolution and Surviving Mars. ![]() "The decision to bring back Evil Genius was really before the resurgence got into the full swing," producer Ash Tregay tells me. I asked Rebellion if this resurgence was part of the reason they wanted to release the Evil Genius sequel now, but it actually seems as though that was a bit of a coincidence too. While it is a coincidence that these releases are back-to-back, it's part of a trend that's been happening over the last couple of years - from spiritual successors such as Two Point Hospital, to entirely new games like Factorio. A few years back they made a free-to-play Facebook game that didn't really work, but now they're making a proper sequel - one that Alice Bee had a lovely time with in her Evil Genius 2 preview. Evil Genius was developed by Elixir Studios, but Rebellion bought the rights back in 2006. Startopia was created by Mucky Foot Productions, while Spacebase Startopia is made by Realmforge Studios (the folks who made the Dungeons series). To find out a little more about this trend, I wrangled the developers from both Rebellion and Realmforge Studios into a big voice call to ask them, and find out what it's like to revive a popular sim from the noughties.įor starters, it's worth noting that these aren't the devs of the original games. It's a brilliant coincidence these games have bagged themselves release dates within a week of each other, and speaks to the resurgence of management games over the last couple of years. The second is a sequel to 2004's Evil Genius, another management sim where you get to play a Bond-esque villain taking over the world. ![]() The first is a spiritual successor to Startopia, the 2001 management sim about looking after space stations for alien travellers. Over the next few days, both Spacebase Startopia and Evil Genius 2: World Domination arrive.
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