Creative Director Ocean Quigley has updated the blog with a letter to all of the Mayors out there! SimCity going Gold means that the game is ready for release!

Hello, I’m Ocean Quigley, SimCity‘s Creative Director. On behalf of the SimCity team, I’m thrilled to tell you that we just finished our Gold Master disc. As you read this, SimCity discs are starting to roll off the assembly line and into their boxes to be sent to stores around the world for their March launch.

I wanted to take this opportunity to tell you how this new SimCity came to be. I started out my career at Maxis as the Art Director for SimCopter and for SimCity 3000. From there I became the Creative Director of SimCity 4, where I had the privilege of developing one of the greatest city-building games of all-time. But that was 2003 and for nearly 10 years I’ve been lobbying the higher ups at EA to let me return to SimCity, the game that brought me into this industry in the first place.

A few years ago, we got our chance. The first thing I did was bring the band back together. I couldn’t find everybody, but I was able to gather a core group of SimCity 4 veterans, and together we set to work. We knew that with modern hardware, we’d be able to take ideas that we’d dreamed about back in SimCity 4’s development and make them real.

We want to take this time to thank all of our friends and families for standing with us as we chased this dream. In particular, I want to thank Lucy Bradshaw, the SVP of Maxis. Admittedly, I told her that if she cut back on funding, she’d regret it! But she took a chance on us and let us chase our dream.

In celebration, we’d like to share a tune from the new SimCity soundtrack with you. The game will be in your hands before you know it, but this might help keep you going until March!

So.. as excited as we all are? In literally less than 2 weeks and we’ll be spending all of the hours in front of our computer screens 🙂