The MindsEye Saga Just Won't Die (And Somehow Keeps Getting Weirder)
Build a Rocket Boy is flying fans in to playtest a game that 250-300 of their former employees got laid off from, and it only gets weirder from there.
Okay so I was gonna write about something else this week but then I saw the headline about Build a Rocket Boy flying fans in, on the company dime, to playtest a game that 250-300 of their own former employees got laid off from, and I had to drop everything. Honestly this is one of the biggest pices i have ever written, there’s just so much here, so bear with me.
Quick catch-up for anyone who missed the earlier chapters of this: MindsEye is the game from Leslie Benzies, the guy who used to run Rockstar North and produced a bunch of the GTA games you’ve definitely played. He left Rockstar in 2016, started his own studio called Build a Rocket Boy, raised something like £233 million, and eight years later delivered a game that launched to a 28 on Metacritic and, at its lowest point, had something like 11 people playing it at once.
That alone would be a normal “big budget game flops” story. Games fail, it happens, Concord happened, Cyberpunk had a rough launch too. But MindsEye didn’t just fail — it turned into a slow-motion corporate meltdown with layoffs, lawsuits, spyware, an Epstein-files mention, and now a protest outside the office while fans got flown in to playtest the same game that got their former coworkers fired. So let’s get into it, from the start.
How We Got Here
Benzies apparently never actually decided what game he was making, according to seven separate employees who told this to the BBC, and to Decode in a different investigation. Eight years, a quarter billion pounds, and reportedly nobody could tell you what the actual pitch was. That’s not a rough patch, that’s a structural problem, and it’s the thing basically every subsequent disaster in this story traces back to.
Staff described a system of “Leslie tickets” — whatever Benzies personally wanted changed that day, no matter how small, jumped the queue ahead of everything else. Didn’t matter what the team was already doing. One developer said feedback from the team was routinely ignored and never acted on. When you’re paying 400 people for their expertise and then overriding all of it based on one guy’s mood after his own playthrough, you’re not really using that expertise for anything.
Then launch happened, June 2025. Pedestrians walking on air, memory leaks, faces glitching out mid-cutscene. PlayStation started handing out refunds almost immediately, which tells you a lot given how reluctant platforms usually are to do that.
Sales were projected at 500k units in month one, internally. Actual number was around 160k total across every platform. Against £233 million spent, that’s somewhere around $8-10 million back. Rockstar spent less making GTA V, and GTA V has made over $8 billion. Same guy, opposite outcome, when he didn’t have anyone around him who could push back.
The Blame Game
Instead of anyone at leadership going “yeah, no clear vision, too much micromanaging, our bad” — the response was sabotage. Co-CEO Mark Gerhard claimed, two weeks before the game even launched, that negative pre-release coverage was a “paid campaign by a third party.” Before anyone outside the studio had played it.
A month after launch, Benzies told the whole staff on a call that the reception was “uncalled for,” that “internal and external forces” were sabotaging the project, and that he’d be launching an investigation to root out saboteurs among the people on that exact call. One week later: layoff notices, to a chunk of the same staff he’d just implied might be traitors.
My honest read on this: when your explanation for a 28-Metacritic launch is “shadowy forces,” and you can’t produce a name or a piece of evidence to back it up over a year later, that’s not really a working theory anymore.
The Spyware Thing
This next part I genuinely thought was a joke the first time I read it, but it’s real. Employees working from home found software called Teramind on their work laptops — the kind that logs keystrokes, records the screen, and captures microphone audio. In people’s actual houses. Gerhard and Benzies confirmed installing it themselves, in an internal meeting that later leaked.
Gerhard’s explanation, roughly, was that they trust 99.9% of the business and it’s the one percent that’s the problem. Which as a justification for recording people’s home microphones is doing a lot of work for a decimal point.
Forty employees filed a grievance, the software got pulled in March 2026, and the union filed actual legal proceedings in April, alongside a separate complaint to the UK’s data protection regulator over the home-audio piece specifically. None of that is legally settled yet — no tribunal ruling, no confirmed fine. But the installation itself isn’t in dispute. They said they did it.
The Epstein Files Thing
In February 2026, in the middle of all of this, Benzies was named in documents connected to the DOJ’s Epstein files release — an allegation from Sarah Ransome, a recognized Epstein survivor, accusing him of sexual assault. Benzies denies it, describes it as a three-month consensual relationship, and says he’s never met Epstein or been near his properties or plane. He went on leave briefly and returned to active duties. This hasn’t been tested in any court that I can find, so I’m not going to sit here and adjudicate it — that’s genuinely not something I’m qualified to weigh in on. I’m including it mostly as a timeline marker, because this is the environment all the other stuff was unfolding in. A lot was happening at once.
The DLC That Was Supposed To Be “Evidence”
BARB released a DLC mission called Blacklisted, which they said would share “some of the evidence of the sabotage” with the community. Inside the actual game. PC Gamer’s review called it short and dull, without even the accidental charm the base game had going for it.
It doesn’t seem to have moved anything — not public opinion, not the legal proceedings, nothing. And if there really is a documented, coordinated sabotage campaign, the obvious move is presenting that to a court or the police, not shipping it as a side quest. As far as I can find, there have still been no arrests and no named defendants in any actual filing, over a year after the first sabotage claim.
IO Interactive Leaves
March 2026, IO Interactive — the Hitman studio, who’d been publishing MindsEye — ended the partnership entirely, and the planned Hitman crossover got cancelled with it. BARB is now self-publishing the game on its own. IO’s CEO gave a pretty diplomatic exit statement about how things “didn’t pan out how they expected,” which is about as close to “we’re out” as a corporate quote gets.
This Week’s Chapter: The Fan Playtest
Mid-July 2026, BARB flew fans in — paid flights, paid accommodation — for what the union is calling an “extravagant” playtest event for upcoming MindsEye content. This is happening after 250-300 layoffs across at least three separate rounds over the past thirteen months. The IWGB union protested outside the Edinburgh HQ over the weekend, and their line was that it’s “a kick in the teeth” for laid-off staff to watch fans get flown in to essentially do work that used to belong to paid employees.
I get wanting player feedback, that’s not inherently a bad move for a struggling game. But the timing is what’s rough here. Third round of layoffs, an active spyware lawsuit, an unrelated serious allegation against the co-founder, and the visible response is a catered fan weekend. Who approved that, and what’s it actually meant to accomplish beyond generating a nicer-looking headline than the one about layoffs?
So What Actually Happened Here
If I had to boil it down — and I want to be careful, because the sabotage claims specifically are unproven, not disproven, and there’s a real difference — it looks like a producer who thrived inside a collaborative structure at Rockstar went off on his own, ended up with total control and basically no checks on his decisions, and total control without pushback turned out not to be the recipe for a good game. Multiple employees, across two separate independent investigations, describe the same pattern: no clear direction, feedback ignored, crunch without the promised follow-through. That’s a lot of unconnected people landing on the same story for it to just be coincidence.
Meanwhile the sabotage narrative has had over a year to produce something concrete and hasn’t. It started as a vague “paid campaign,” became “internal and external forces,” then got a specific dollar figure and a named agency attached, then a DLC mission that was supposed to show evidence and didn’t. Each version gets more specific in the numbers and no more specific in the proof, which usually isn’t the direction real evidence moves in.
Could there be something to the sabotage claims? I can’t rule it out completely, stranger things have happened in this industry. But “possible” and “the actual explanation for why a well-funded studio with no coherent creative direction shipped a broken game” are two different bars, and right now only one of them has anything behind it.
What’s Actually Being Asked Here
A few things I think genuinely need answers, from someone — a journalist, a court, anybody with subpoena power ideally:
Where is the evidence for the sabotage claims. If there’s a real operation with a named agency and named individuals behind it, the follow-through should be a police report with a case number, not a video game mission and a LinkedIn post.
What is the actual current plan for the studio. Roughly eighty people left, no outside publisher anymore, legal proceedings running on multiple fronts, and the visible strategy this month is a fan event. Is there a real roadmap behind that, or is it mostly about generating a better headline than “more layoffs.”
And why does the pattern keep repeating in the same order — bad news, then a sabotage claim, then a layoff round, then a PR move to cover it. Once is a coincidence. This is the fourth or fifth time through the same cycle.
I don’t have clean answers to any of that, and honestly nobody outside the company fully does yet — the legal side is still working through actual channels, which takes time whether or not that’s satisfying to hear. But when the union is standing outside your building with signs while you’re flying strangers in for a free weekend, “trust us, it’s sabotage” is a harder sell than it used to be.
I’ll probably be back on this in another couple months, because at this point Build a Rocket Boy has stopped being a one-off story for me and turned into something closer to a beat, whether I meant to sign up for that or not.
If you’re a current or former BARB employee and want to talk, my inbox is open, always is.