Sword

As the producer behind the Grand Theft Auto games from GTA 3 through to GTA 5, as well as Red Dead Redemption and LA Noire, any project with Leslie Benzies’ name on it is going to be a lightning rod for attention.

MindsEye, the first game from Benzies’ studio Build A Rocket Boy, is getting plenty of it – even if some of that attention has been less positive.

MindsEye is a single-player third-person shooter with vehicle gameplay, set in a Las Vegas-style city called Redrock. It’s a techno-thriller story about a former soldier called Jacob Diaz – but it’s clear from visiting BARB in Edinburgh this week that the game is envisioned as a gateway into something much larger, both in the fiction of MindsEye, and for players who pick the game up.

That includes a user-generated content platform called Build.MindsEye, where players on PC can create levels using relatively straightforward tools that incorporate any object in the game.

When asked if third-person shooter levels or driving sections were the limits of the build side of MindsEye, the developers showed other examples of how they can be used, like massively increasing the proportions of a basketball, dropping it into the world, and functionally making an in-game version of Rocket League.

Still, while MindsEye launches on June 10, 2025, for PC and consoles, many questions remain unanswered, including the future of its long-gestating Everywhere project.

Benzies sat down with GamesIndustry.biz earlier this week to talk us through his vision for the game.

This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Image credit: Austin Hargrave

What’s your grand vision for MindsEye? What will it be at launch, and where is it going in the future?

MindsEye is one story in an epic universe. The other stories take place at different time periods, and [at] different locations in the universe. This story is Jacob Diaz’s story. There are also other stories within MindsEye, so we tell the backstories of other characters Jacob will meet.

That’s the way we’re going to fill out the universe over time – so when you travel around, all the stories will be connected by one overarching theme, and each story will have different mechanics. And we’ll give these mechanics to players within the creator tools.

What will happen with the game after launch?

[The studio] will support the game through Play.MindsEye, with continuous new content. Some of the content, like races, are made just for fun. But [with] most of the content, we’ll try and incorporate it into the story. So once you’ve played the big overarching ten-year plan, you’ll have a very good idea of what this universe looks like.

We have plans to add multiplayer, [and] we have plans to make a full open world. And of course, we’ve also got to look at what players are creating, and incorporate that into our plans. Given the ease of the tools, we think there’s going to be a high percentage of players who will jump in and give it a pop, see how it feels. Hopefully some will create compelling content we can then promote and make that part of our plans to push to other players.

Is it best to think of MindsEye as the first game in a series of games? Or one game as part of a larger experience?

MindsEye sits bang in the middle of our story. So, we’re going to go back 10,000 years, then we’re going to go forward a certain amount of time. It’s the relevant piece of the puzzle that will have players asking questions of what the bigger story is.

We’ve intentionally not released footage of huge parts of the game, because we don’t want to spoil anything for players. But this story does take some unusual twists.

What’s your vision for the multiplayer component of the game?

I guess there’s two sides to the answer. The dream from the building side is to allow players the opportunity to create their own multiplayer open world games with ease. So anyone could pick up the game, jump in, drive around, stop at a point where they see something of interest, build a little mission, jump back in the car, drive again, build another mission. Once you’ve built a couple of hundred of these, you’ve built your own open world game. So, that’s the build side.

From our side, we want to [create] a place where people can socialise, play together, and engage in the stories that we build. So, we do have plans next year to launch an open world multiplayer game that takes place a year after MindsEye finishes. In the interim, we also have an open world free roam game that spans from when MindsEye finishes to the launch of the open world multiplayer game.

All of these stories interconnect in a fairly unique and original way, which I think players like these days. They like the complexity of deeper stories.

You’re selling the base game at launch, with a pass for upcoming content additions. Do you have a vision for how you’re going to package future stories in the overarching MindsEye experience?

It depends on the scale of the story. Some will be free, and some will be paid.

After you left Rockstar Games, what came next? What led to you building the studio?

I spent a few years looking into some other things: going [into] some property development. Using some of the games experience, we made a thing called VR-Chitect, which allowed you to build houses and view them in VR.

I spent a lot of time in Los Angeles at this point, and this is when the droughts were very bad. I got into [making] these machines that would suck water out of the air. Still sitting in my back garden in Los Angeles is this big clunky machine, it works like an air-conditioning unit. It could suck up one thousand litres of water. So I got involved with that.

But there’s really nothing like making games. The different types of people – the lawyers, the accountants, the programmers, the artists, the dancers, the singers – that bunch of people in one big pot, all working together, and turning something from a piece of paper into [something on the] screen – that’s where I get my excitement.

Since I was a kid, that’s what I’ve wanted to do. I thought, ‘I better get back into making games’ because nothing else was as much fun.

What was the journey towards creating MindsEye as your first standalone release?

Your first game’s always your hardest. You have to build systems, you have to build the team. Everything is new. You don’t really see a lot on the screen until way down the line, because you’re building underlying systems, physics systems, the gameplay systems.

It’s a slow start, but what you end up with is an engine, and obviously we use Unreal, which provides a certain level of support and building. On top of that, we’ve got to build our own stuff.

[Plus], we have to pack up everything we build and present it nicely for the creator tools. So it adds this extra layer of complexity to everything. But now, given where we are, the speed that we can iterate, we can very quickly place enemies, place vehicles, place puzzles, whatever, and get a feel for a game.

We’ve now got a great, experienced team – a lot of talented guys in there. In the old days, you’d get a game, stick it on the shelf, and you’d wave goodbye. It’s not like that anymore. You’re continually fixing things.

When you release a game, you’ve suddenly got, not a hundred testers, but hopefully millions of testers. You’ve got to continually fix, continually optimise, and especially with the tools that we’ve got, we want to continually create new content.

So MindsEye is a standalone game, and Everywhere is not mentioned anywhere on the Steam page. But obviously there’s a strong ‘build’ component to this game, which was part of the Everywhere pitch. What does this mean for Everywhere, and what was behind the decision to package the game this way?

This is all part of a bigger story and ecosystem that we’ve got planned.

Everywhere is going to show up again pretty soon. Everything we’re working on, there’s a story behind it – a big overarching story. So Everywhere will come back, and it fits into this story somewhere. I can’t tell you [where], because it would be a spoiler. But that’s going to reappear soon, and it will all be a part of the same product.

“I’m not sure it would’ve been smart as a company to say, ‘we are going to compete with the biggest game on the planet'”

Leslie Benzies, Build A Rocket Boy

In terms of the tools, the tool doesn’t really care what world you’re building in. It sits separately. So any game we create, it will naturally work on top of it. But we’re big fans of keeping everything thematically connected, or connected through a narrative, and you’ll see it.

The bigger story will become obvious, once you’ve played through all of MindsEye. Then you might start to see how it all connects together, to the Everywhere world.

Has the landscape for something like Everywhere, or the build component to MindsEye, changed as platforms like UEFN have taken off or Roblox has become so huge?

It’s great to see these tools being used by people. I build a lot with my son, and when he builds, I see the excitement he gets. It reminds me of when I was a kid with my Dragon 32 computer, managing to get a little character moving on the screen – that excitement of, ‘wow, I did that’. Giving that to other people is massive.

It’s still very difficult to build in Roblox. For example, when my son wants to do it, I have to jump in. I used to be a programmer, and I struggle to build in there.

When he wants to run around and scream with his friends he’s in Roblox; when he wants to build he’ll jump into Minecraft, because Minecraft is a much easier system to build within. And I think we sit somewhere in the middle: you can get very high quality, fun games, but they’re very easy to build.

I think we’re at the infancy of this in video games. We’re at the very beginning of it, and we’re going to see way, way more of it. It doesn’t necessarily have to be presenting it to your friends, or to an audience. I think the process of creating for a human being is fun in itself.

MindsEye has been positioned as a linear game. You are best known for creating open world games. What was behind the decision to make MindsEye a more linear, narrative-driven experience?

I think certain stories are more difficult to present to players in an open world setting. Open world gives you freedom – you don’t necessarily want freedom to portray a story. For MindsEye, it’s a very set time in a character, Jacob Diaz’s, life. You pick up as Jacob when he arrives in Redrock, and then you leave Jacob at a certain point in the future.

And so, it’d be very difficult for us to have an open world in there. It’s horses for courses: it depends what you’re doing. But for Jacob’s story, it had to be a linear game.

Having said that, there are open world experiences in there, and we can build them through Build.MindsEye. There is a free roam open world mode, where you play [as] a different character and you see his time, from the end of MindsEye, to the point of our next big planned launch.

Again, they’re all connected through a narrative, and we really want to show the universe, show the stories that have taken place in the universe, the characters in that universe, and see how they’ve experienced the same experience but from different viewpoints.

“The dream from the building side is to allow players the opportunity to create their own multiplayer open world games with ease”

Leslie Benzies, Build A Rocket Boy

Was there ever a discussion about creating a more traditional GTA competitor?

In design, you look at a lot of different options.

I’m not sure it would’ve been smart as a company to say, ‘we are going to compete with the biggest game on the planet’. I’m not sure that would be the best business decision to make. We went through a bunch of different designs, and to tell our story, this is what we landed on.

MindsEye is priced more like a game from a decade ago at $60, and it’ll take around 20 hours to finish. Can you talk about how you settled on the game’s length and scope, and how you made that decision around price?

So you’ve got the MindsEye campaign, and yes, it’ll be about 20ish hours. But you do have all this other side content: there’s going to be this continuous stream of content.

These days, there are so many different options for people. It’s not just games: there’s streaming TV, so many good shows out there. I don’t think you can have filler content in games. I think people want the meat, and they want the potatoes. We’ve tried to make as much meat as we can, if that makes sense.

I think that’s a good length for a game. What you also find through data, is that [with] big games, people don’t play them all. The majority of people – 60% or 70% of people – don’t actually play games to the end.

So when you’re making something, I would prefer – I’m sure the team would say the same – [that] you had the whole experience from start to finish, and not create this 200-hour game. Create something that is finishable, but have some side things that will fill out the universe. A lot of the side missions on the play side of MindsEye do fill out the characters’ back stories, or do fill out what was happening in the world.

On price: the world’s in a funny place. People are worried about the price of eggs. So value for money, I think people appreciate that when times are difficult.

I was curious why you waited until quite late in the day to reveal the build element of the game, only because it seemed you were being quite church and state with how MindsEye is releasing versus what Everywhere is.

So in general, we believe – and again, it goes back to the amount of information, the amount of options people have these days – I don’t think you can have extended marketing times. It’s very expensive, we’re a start-up. I think you lose interest from people.

There are so many things for people to do, that if you extend it, you’re not punching through to the place you need to be.

I’ve seen other games, nine years before launch, it’s getting talked about. I’m not sure that’s the way of the world these days. You’ll see there are games that never go to market: the day of launch was the marketing campaign, and it worked very well. So I think we tried to compress ours down for that reason.

On the MindsEye.Play [continuous content] part of it, yeah, maybe we should’ve got that out there sooner, but it is a nice little surprise to give players.

That’s the thing with marketing – you never know what’s the right or wrong way to do it, you’ve got to go with your gut, your senses, and test it.

Being who you are, it brings a certain level of expectation and attention. Do you find it a double-edged sword, launching a new studio and launching a new game, with your background?

Yes. There’s always comparisons, and I think that’s how humans work.

As kids, we’re taught to put a triangle into a triangular hole, and a square into a square hole. I think we do that for the rest of our lives, and we like to describe something new as ‘it’s X plus Y, with a bit of Z in there’. It makes things easy for us. It’s maybe humans optimising the way we communicate.

So there are comparisons. It serves us well in some ways, it doesn’t serve us well in others. Dave Grohl said it well when he formed the Foo Fighters: nobody’s interested in the Foo Fighters, all they were interested in was Nirvana.

The guys have built something very cool, and I just hope people can see it for what it’s trying to be.

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