The Sniper Elite series developer Rebellion has announced it's working on a new Evil Genius game that's a "fully-fledged sequel" to Elixir Studios' 2004 RTS.

Speaking via a newly released E3 interview, Rebellion's CEO Jason Kingsley says Evil Genius 2 is something he and his team have wanted to do for some time, and that there are people actually working on the anticipated follow-up already.

"We'd like to make this super-duper clear," reads a statement. "This isn't a remaster." Rebellion goes onto say EG2 is a fully-formed sequel that won't be free-to-play and will feature first on PC. The statement later highlights that development kicked off back in spring using the company's in-house Asura engine, and is still at a "very, very early stage."

Nevertheless, this news marks the first time Rebellion has spoken officially about an Evil Genius 2 in almost four years.

"So why didn’t we go ahead with it?" the statement continues in reference to the delay. "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 and 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."

Rebellion asks that we bear with it "a little longer", so expect more details on Evil Genius 2 in the coming months. Until then, here's Kingsley's interview from E3 (skip to the 3.30 mark for word on the sequel itself):