A reboot of SimCity, the seminal city-building simulation game, was announced by Electronic Arts on Tuesday at the Game Developers Conference, and is set for release on PC in 2013, reports The Verge. It was revealed at an event titled "EA Game Changers" and will be developed by Maxis, which was bought by EA in 1997.
This latest entry will feature a couple firsts for the franchise: curved roads and some form of social interactivity, though the extent of that feature is not yet known.
Lucy Bradshaw, Senior Vice President at EA Maxis told The Verge that the new game, which for now is titled simply SimCity, is "going back to Maxis," which could be taken as acknowledgment of the disappointing reception of the more recent SimCity Societies, which was not developed by Maxis. "It"s been about 10 years since we shipped the last true Maxis SimCity," Bradshaw said.
Will Wright, the creator of the original SimCity and other major titles like The Sims, The Sims 2 and Spore, will apparently not be involved with the new SimCity. Wright left Maxis in 2009 to run Stupid Fun Club, an entertainment think tank.
You can watch the announcement trailer for the new game below. The trailer includes a disclaimer saying that "Images [are] not representative of actual gameplay," so don"t get your hopes up too high just yet. Additionally, while the video description claims that the game is coming to both PCs and Macs, an EA representative told The Verge that the description is erroneous and that the company is focusing solely on the PC release so far, with no official announcement of a Mac OS version yet.