14 DAY TRIAL // Cities: Skylines, the hit city management simulator from Colossal Order and Paradox Interactive, spent a long time as a fanciful idea in the minds of its developers, but the project got greenlit after the whole SimCity debacle from 2013, when the new title made by Maxis and published by Electronic Arts caused quite an uproar.
The city management genre has been a tough one for titles that weren't in EA's SimCity franchise, as many fans considered the entries from Maxis to be pinnacle in terms of features or presentation.
Unfortunately, 2013's SimCity, which tried to reboot the series with some new mechanics and an always-online requirement to promote social gaming, caused a lot of damage to the reputation of the series. After several major updates, the game was turned into an offline experience through a massive retooling that in the end contributed to the closure of Maxis as a studio.
The SimCity debacle helped Cities: Skylines enter production
However, there was also a bright side to the whole controversy, as the reaction from fans convinced publisher Paradox Interactive to greenlight the Cities: Skylines project at Colossal Order.
According to the studio's CEO, Mariina Hallikainen, the idea wasn't in active development in 2013, but after the lackluster debut of SimCity, things quickly changed and resources were granted by Paradox.
"When they announced [SimCity 2013] I was pretty sure there was no way we would ever be able to convince Paradox that we should make this game. But, yeah, they gave us the green light after they saw what happened with SimCity. So that was actually seeing SimCity 2013 kind of stumble, that's when Paradox said, hey, maybe we should go ahead with this since people aren't really happy with the last SimCity?"
The rest is history, as Cities: Skylines went on to sell hundreds of thousands of copies and experienced a great word-of-mouth marketing campaign since its debut earlier this month on PC, Mac, and Linux.
