A number of former staff at MindsEye developers Build A Rocket Boy have offered some more details on alleged mismanagement at the company. They claim that director Leslie Benzies “never decided what game he wanted to make” during development of both dodgy action-adventure MindsEye and the umbrella game creation tool Everywhere. The former developers also paint a picture of disruptive micro-management, with issues Benzies spotted being named after him and forced to the top of the priority list.
This is according to a report from the BBC, which follows 93 current and former staff at Build a Rocket Boy signing an open letter accusing the studio’s senior leadership of having “consistently mishandled the redundancy process” when laying off between 250 and 300 staff. The letter signees also claim BARB mandated “unbearable levels of overtime” around the game’s launch.
These developers have also filed legal claims against the studio, with help from the Independent Workers of Great Britain union. Build a Rocket Boy have said they handled the redundancies “with care and transparency, meeting all our obligations”, adding that they’re “listening closely to feedback from former employees and are committed to learning and growing from it”.
“Leslie never decided what game he wanted to make,” said ‘Jamie’, an anonymous former Build a Rocket Boy developer who left the company in 2022. They described the studio’s initial pitch for Everywhere – an online game creation tool organised around a city hub, which BARB have shelved while they work on fixing MindsEye – as “something quite special”. The studio managed to pull in a lot of cash in those early days, accruing more than £233 million of investment by 2024, but were still posting losses.
Mismanagement was rife at BARB, former employees say, with former associate producer Margherita ‘Marg’ Peloso alleging their attempts to raise concerns about issues were “laughed off”. Benzies in particular is singled out as having made things worse with his approach to highlighting problems in the game, with the devs citing a YouTube video on Build a Rocket Boy’s channel that shows the director playing the game while instructing folks to pen down issues with the likes of fire extinguishers and raindrops.
The ex-staff say these fix requests were known as “Leslie tickets”, with Jamie saying they were also dubbed “Leslie bugs” or just “Leslies”. The issue, they claim, is that such bugs or sometimes requests to scrap entire missions were all expected to be shunted straight to the front of the queue. “It didn’t matter what else you were doing, what else was being worked on,” said former lead data analyst Ben Newbon. “The Leslie ticket had to be taken care of.”
Further in, Newbon cites the studio’s quality assurance team as having been particularly badly affected by crunch in the run-up to MindsEye’s release from mid-February to May. According to ex-Build a Rocket Boy audio programmer Isaac Hudd, “mistakes started piling up” as the devs were pushed harder, with previously fixed bugs being accidentally revived amid attempts to swat others.
That brings us to the current state of play, with the remaining staff at Build a Rocket Boy saying they’re still committed to improving MindsEye, while the former devs take action. “We all know each other, and we know how much we’re worth,” Peloso said of the reason they chose to speak out. “We need to stand together.”
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