"And here, at City Hall, you can see we've got a little Occupy movement going on."

Kip Katsarelis gestures at the giant flatscreen, where a rowdy bunch of Sims have gathered to wave signs in front of his mayoral office. Their main beef? Unemployment under Katsarelis has hit a whopping 66%.

While some of the protesters want him to build more parks, that's not going to help hiring. But the offer from a coal executive to build his corporate HQ over one of those parks — for a mere 1,000 simoleons — just might.

Luckily, Katsarelis is a senior producer at games company Maxis rather than a real mayor. And this is just a game, although we are in Emeryville, just across the San Francisco Bay from the real Occupy movement.

We're here to get an early look at the 2013 version of one of the greatest games of all time, the 1989 classic that spawned the whole "Sim" franchise and made urban planning fun: SimCity.

We've known for some weeks that a new version of the game would be launching sometime next year (a reboot of the franchise, simply called SimCity rather than SimCity 5.) But this is the first time the company has revealed details.

Mashable was there to get a peek under the hood. And if this preview is any indication, we're going to be spending much of next year glued to our PC screens. (Sadly, no version for any platform other than Windows is planned — yet.)

This reboot has been a long time coming. Maxis, now a division of Electronic Arts, produced SimCity 4 nearly a decade ago — and computing power has made quantum leaps since that version.

"Everything we dreamed of doing back then, everything we talked about idly at lunchtime, we can now do," says Ocean Quigley, the game's creative director.

So what does that mean? Well, first of all, the game looks stunning, even in this early build. Roads are finally able to curve and switch back, not sit on a grid.

And Quigley has made great use of tilt-shifting — the focus and blur technique popularized by Instagram.

When you tilt-shift a cityscape, as Quigley points out, it looks more like you're sitting in the clouds above it all. That seems highly appropriate for a title that helped invent the genre known as "God games."

The second major advance in the new SimCity: multiplayer. You and your friends can now be the mayors of competing cities, ranked by everything from their economic power to their environmental impact, while sending each other real-time chat messages. (Move over, FarmVille.)

Oddly enough, this competition looks like it will lead to a kind of cooperative play. With you and your friends' cities constantly interacting, it's much easier to build a specialized cities.

That should make SimCity a lot more like real life. In previous games, every town had to plop down a grocery list of buildings to keep its citizens happy. (University? check. Sports stadium? check.) Now you can diversify.

For example, maybe your wife would want to build a college town, while your best friend aims for a Vegas-style casino city and you provide them all with power (and pollute them all, and strike it rich) as a coal-mining capital.

The game will aggregate the economies of all its players, even the ones not playing in your little group; that algorithm governs the price of things like energy.

You may never see it on your screens, but there's a whole Sim World out there, constantly evolving.

This kind of emergent behavior is at work within your city, too. The game now keeps track of every single Sim in your city. It knows where they live, where they work, what time they have to get to work, and what kind of car they drive.

If your Sims lose their jobs, they may leave town — and if things get really bad, you may see them sleeping rough on park benches.

Yes, that's right — SimCity now has Sim Homeless. (No word on whether they will be wearing Sim hotspots.)

But perhaps the most controversial decision the designers have made, for the sake of simplicity, is this: there is no social mobility in SimCity.

You have blue collar Sims, middle class Sims and white collar Sims. While they may move in and out of the same kinds of jobs, or look for work outside your city, they will not change careers till the day they die.

Right-wing critics may fume at that. Others may nod their heads sadly and say: yep, that's just the way life is.

Regardless of your viewpoint, this and a host of other factors make the game seem a little more urgent, more relevant to our extreme economic times. And at the same time, the gameplay is easier to pick up than ever (no complicated tax spreadsheets required).

Call it a game for the 99%.