Leslie Benzies’ team, Build A Rocket Boy, is looking increasingly promising…

Benzies set up his studio in 2016 after leaving Rockstar North and has recruited three industry veterans to his management team. Mick Hocking, formerly co-founder of Evolution Studios (PS2 WRC series, MotorStorm, DriveClub), has been appointed chief development officer. He has other previous Sony connections, having served as the studio director of Sony Computer Entertainment Liverpool Studio, PlayStation London Studio, vice president of Sony Computer Entertainment Europe, and vice president of product development at Codemasters.

Murray Pannell is senior vice president of global marketing at Build A Rocket Boy. Before it, he was vice president of European publishing at 2K (=Take-Two). He has also played roles as PlayStation UK and Ireland’s marketing director at Ubisoft and group product marketing manager at Xbox. Randall Price will be the chief publishing officer and was most recently senior vice president of publishing at NCsoft. And before that spent 15 years at Guild Wars developer ArenaNet, where he was senior vice president of global business.

Benzies, president of the studio and director of their upcoming game Everywhere, said, “Since 2016, Build A Rocket Boy’s team has been quietly growing, and today we’re delighted to welcome Mick, Murray and Randall to the studio publicly. Each brings a huge amount of experience, knowledge and passion to Build A Rocket Boy as we continue development on Everywhere. We’re looking forward to having more to announce from the team later in 2022.”

Interestingly, it is the first time the Scottish studio has come out with such an announcement in almost two years. It emerged earlier this year that Galaxy Interactive, which has invested in the studio, is calling Everywhere a Ready Player One game set in the real world (here, it also referred to the book and the movie; these are about an open world set in virtual reality). It called it an “open-world AAA game with a multiplayer experience incorporating a multi-chapter epic narrative, user-generated content through a ‘virtual sandbox’ where players can create their worlds, and deep social and streaming integrations.”

We’ll see.

Source: VGC