Two years ago, in the early days of this blog, I wrote a post about Ascendancy II.
It was in part a celebration of Ascendancy, the people who created it, and the immense role the game played in my childhood… and in the other part it was a vaguely bitter and definitely melodramatic rant about The Logic Factory saying they might develop the sequel to Ascendancy on a platform I had no access to. So — pretty on par with the quality and professionalism you should expect from the first year or so of my blogging career.
Here’s the weird part: that post is the most visited page on this blog. With almost double the hits of my next most popular post. Even now there’s still a slow trickle of people coming here for that post alone. And while it’s no longer the case, for a long time I was on the first page of the Google search results when you typed in “ascendancy 2.”
That says a lot if you look between the lines. For starters, people love Ascendancy just like I do — and they want to know what’s up with the sequel. Not a big surprise, since the old fans have been waiting for a sequel for almost twenty years, and the iOS port created a whole new generation of fans to join us in the waiting game.
If my dumb old blog can make it to the first page of Google, it also says that there isn’t much information going around about Ascendancy II. The Logic Factory has always been really quiet, and while they’ve teased us for years and years, no concrete information exists. At all. The closest we ever got was that logo at the top of this post, and one music sample allegedly from the game.
That’s why this third realization worries me: I feel like the fact that my blog was so high up on the search results — or even the fact that I was talking about Ascendancy II at all — makes people think I know what I’m talking about. Like I’m some authority, or that I’ve got insider information.
So, first — here’s the sad truth. If you’ve come here looking for answers, I don’t have many. I wish I could say one way or another what’s going on behind closed doors at The Logic Factory. But I’m just a fan like you, waiting and hoping for the sequel to one of my favorite games ever.
So what do we know about Ascendancy II? In preparing to write this follow-up, I’ve discovered… nothing new. The last real news was the few tidbits we got back in 2012. Ascendancy II was in development. It had some music. There was a working subtitle: Multiverse. And it was probably going to be exclusively for iOS.
That’s literally all we know, and the only thing that’s changed since 2012 is The Logic Factory’s website. When I checked a year or so ago, they’d removed all mention of Ascendancy II. Now the whole website has gone dark.
It doesn’t bode well, honestly. But then again, The Logic Factory was silent for over a decade between The Tone Rebellion and the remake of Ascendancy. They’ve always been enigmatic and quiet. Heck, they’re a videogame developer that somehow went fourteen years without developing a single videogame. We’ll hear from them again, I think. I just hope it doesn’t take until 2025.