Gaming

Build A Rocket Boy Closes, and Its Ambition Scatters Into the Industry's Future

By Omar aka Crypt0 · Sep 17, 2026

The studio that set out to reinvent how games get made is closing its doors. Build A Rocket Boy, founded by former Rockstar North veterans Leslie Benzies, Matthew Smith, and Colin Entwistle, is winding down following the difficult launch of its debut title MindsEye. The original vision was grander than any single game: a free to play multiplayer platform called Everywhere, built on Unreal Engine 5. The ambition outlived the studio, and that is where the real story starts.

MindsEye released on June 10, 2025 as a third person action adventure title, and the reception was unsparing. Critics landed at 39 out of 100 on Metacritic across 16 reviews; players went further, with a user score of 2.7 out of 10. It was one of those rare launches where critics and players fully agreed. Publisher IO Interactive ended its publishing collaboration with the studio and canceled a planned crossover with its Hitman series. Kotaku reports that sources familiar with the situation say the studio is closing permanently, though the company has yet to comment publicly.

The farewell posts tell the human side. Principal talent acquisition partner Dan Hawkins wrote on LinkedIn that he would see the company through till the very end, helping wrap things up in HR. Colleagues including lead 3D weapon and prop artist Adam Ridsdale, release manager Michaela Emslie, level designer Liam Shannon, and QA analyst Elizabet Tyaneva posted their own goodbyes within the same 24 hour window. One early hire recalled taking the studio from 200 to 550 people in a short period. That scale of hiring, backed by $110 million raised in 2020 from investors including NetEase and Galaxy Interactive plus another $110 million Series D in February 2024 led by RedBird Capital Partners, shows how much belief once flowed toward this vision.

The useful read here is about what closures redistribute. Hundreds of developers who spent years building platform scale multiplayer systems, creation tools, and live service infrastructure now carry that experience into new teams across the industry. The Everywhere concept, a persistent multiplayer platform rather than a single boxed product, keeps resurfacing across the industry because the idea itself has momentum beyond any one studio's fate. Experience with large scale online systems is among the most transferable currencies in game development right now, and this team holds plenty of it.

There is also a creative ledger worth balancing. MindsEye aimed high and landed far below its own ambitions; the gap between the two is the tuition the whole industry pays for attempting new forms. Every bold swing that misses still moves the design conversation forward, and the people who took the swing get to take the next one somewhere new. The industry's labor voice stays engaged too: the IWGB Games Worker Union says it remains committed to supporting the studio's workers through the transition.

The studio winds down, but its people, its platform thinking, and its ideas disperse into dozens of future projects. Readers will play games shaped by this team's experience within a few years, with the influence visible only in the quality of the work. That is how the industry metabolizes ambition: work built with that much effort keeps finding new homes.

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