Rebellion has announced they’re working on a sequel to Evil Genius.

The upcoming sequel will follow in the footsteps of its predecessor, where you’ll be selecting a particular supervillain and building your evil lair, expanding your empire, and of course – eventually take over the world, or destroy it.

Featured above, you can view an interview with Rebellion CEO Jason Kingsley, where he talks up the British studio’s lineup of games, and how the sequel fits into their upcoming roster of games.

To recap, Rebellion originally acquired the Evil Genius IP back in 2009, five years after the original series developer Elixir had announced a sequel – unfortunately that sequel never happened. Now, Rebellion is developing the sequel for PC – consoles aren’t ruled out, either.

Here’s a rundown on why they’re working on a sequel now, and why they’re not crowdfunding it either:

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!