Today at Gamescom in Cologne, Germany, Electronic Arts announced that SimCity will arrive on Mac early next year via the publisher’s Origin distribution service.
“Whether you owned a Macintosh or a DOS PC, we all have memories of laying down zones and reticulating splines from our youth,” said Lucy Bradshaw, the senior vice president and general manager of EA’s Maxis label, the developers of the upcoming game. “To the millions of SimCity fans out there, we’ve been listening and can proudly say that your calls have been answered.”
Attendees at Gamescom this week, from August 15-19, are among the first to go play the PC version. They’ll also preview SimCity World, a new feature that records players’ progress through CityLog and allows them to compete in global challenges, compare their scores on the leaderboards, and influence the economy in the Global Market.
Gamescom isn’t the only way that prospective players can try the game. EA and Maxis have opened registration for the SimCity closed beta.
The SimCity franchise, which has existed since 1989, has sold 30 million copies in its lifetime. In June, EA unveiled the Facebook game SimCity Social, thought to be a counterattack against Zynga’s CityVille, one of the top games on the platform. More recently, EA filed a lawsuit against the social game giant, claiming Zynga’s TheVille (launched in July of this year) is a clone of its own The Sims Social (from August 2011).