I’d say the most important learning from the CIM games was getting to know the community and the meaning of modding for our games. We learned so much from working together, working with a publisher, and most importantly about our player base.

Cities in Motion games were really a stepping stone for us, a focus on one aspect of a city builder: mass transit. This was back in 2009 and we were five people with limited funding, so we decided to start with something smaller to build toward greater challenges. This was the dream from the start! We founded Colossal Order with the intent that one day “Colossal Cities” would see the light of day. What about the city-builder genre made this an even more attractive project than Colossal Order’s prior projects? Did the team take any learnings from the Cities in Motion titles into Skylines? We tried to focus on making the game feel bigger than it actually was by allowing as much freedom for the player as possible and supporting modding as extensively as we technically could. Visual work such as day and night cycle and seasons were out of the question and we would have loved to create more variation for the assets. Naturally, the ambition was much greater than our resources at the time, so we had to prioritize on the amount of content and different features.

We had some serious SimCity fans in the dev team and wanted to achieve a spiritual successor to SimCity 4. When the team started development on Cities: Skylines, what inspirations did it look at and pull from for the initial concepting? We had a chance to speak with Mariina Hallikainen, CEO of developer Colossal Order, about the development and continued support of Cities: Skylines. The result is a game that today, six years later, still has a dedicated community playing the title and delivering a vibrant mod scene. While Cities: Skylines was every bit a modern entry in the genre many grew up loving, it forewent the negative aspects of the modern formula, while embracing the community wholeheartedly. The 2015 release of Cities: Skylines delivered something fans of the mid-'90s city builder titles had been sorely missing: a modern, yet faithful reimagining of the genre.

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