LogIn"Leslie never decided what game he wanted to make."
Build A Rocket Boy
Build a Rocket Boy, created by Leslie Benzies, a GTA producer, was a promising company with a fresh vision when it first appeared. First with EVERYWHERE, a AAA gaming experience, and then shifting focus to its MindsEye game, it seemingly had structure, but the reality was not that sunny, as its workers report.
MindsEye launched to a slew of negativity, with players criticizing its optimization, bugs, NPC AI, the desolate world, and a lot more. Benzies blamed the failure on "saboteurs" inside and outside the studio.
"I find it disgusting that anyone could sit amongst us, behave like this and continue to work here," he told his employees, according to BBC Newsbeat.
The workers were stunned by the statement, as the reasons for the flop were quite clear, and no, it was not some kind of sabotage.
The issue with the whole studio was that it was all over the place. "I thought we had something quite special," said a former employee who worked on EVERYWHERE, which they described as a multiplayer role-playing game (RPG) based in an open-ended, futuristic city.
Benzies wanted new ideas and features to be added quickly, too quickly for them to be properly implemented.
Build A Rocket Boy
MindsEye was initially supposed to be a game within EVERYWHERE, but "Leslie never decided what game he wanted to make," the same employee said. "There was no coherent direction".
This style "plagued the project from the start", and it is not that surprising if you follow the studio's development.
After the disastrous launch of MindsEye, Build a Rocket Boy announced a wave of layoffs. Enraged, its employees, former and current, together with the Game Workers Branch of the Independent Workers of Great Britain (IWGB), wrote an open letter to the company's executive leadership, accusing it of "longstanding disrespect and mistreatment."
They say that the leadership "repeatedly refused to listen" to them and Benzies micro-managed the studio. Former lead data analyst Ben Newbon says that "a lot of the points that we were hammering home on were just ignored and just never actioned."
Benzies's micro-management often led to "Leslie tickets," also known as "Leslie bugs" and "Leslies".
"Developers told Newsbeat these could range from minor cosmetic issues to instructions to ditch whole missions from the game, and there was an expectation that these would be given top priority," BBC reports.
"It didn't matter what else you were doing, what else was being worked on," added Newbon, "the Leslie ticket had to be taken care of."
MindsEye was released in June, and the period from mid-February to May was plagued with crunch, with the majority of staff working an extra eight hours a week unpaid. They were eventually promised seven hours of leave per eight hours' overtime after MindsEye's release.
"People just felt like they were being commanded to give a lot to the company without too much in return," said associate producer Margherita "Marg" Peloso.
Former audio programmer Isaac Hudd added that "mistakes started piling up" and "regressions", where one team would fix a bug only for another to unwittingly bring it back, became increasingly common.
"And it does mess with you," he says. "You really do start to see the morale go down, the little arguments starting to happen. People are burning the candle at both ends and starting to think: 'What's the point?'"
When the game was released, the studio celebrated, but soon, when the reviews started piling up, the mood soured. "The version of the game that was released did not reflect the experience our community deserved," the developers believe.
The team remained committed to "ultimately delivering MindsEye as the game we always envisioned – and the one players are excited to play," but the game will unlikely ever rise from the place it got itself in.
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