Although there are still a little over two months left of 2025, it appears that Build A Rocket Boy (BARB) will be the year’s biggest flop.
The BBC spoke with several former BARB employees who revealed new details about the weak development process of MindsEye. One developer, whom we’ll call Jamie, points directly to Leslie Benzies’ lack of direction. According to Jamie, Benzies never decided what kind of game he wanted to make. There was no coherent direction. Two other former developers, Ben Newbon and Margherita Peloso, provided damning details about how Benzies and management responded when the development team raised issues. According to Newbon, many of their points were ignored, and no action was ever taken. Peloso added that management allegedly laughed off their concerns when they or other employees tried to raise issues.
However, Benzies and management were concerned about the problems Benzies himself noticed while testing his own game, a process BARB presented to the public in the MindsEye promotional video. It’s not unusual for a game director to test the game and point out problems to be solved, as the video below shows in Benzies’s case. What the video does not show, and what Newbon and Peloso highlight, is that the bug tickets flagged by Benzies suddenly took precedence over everything else. The developers began referring to these bug reports as “Leslie bugs,” “Leslie issues,” or simply “Leslies.”
According to Newbon, what else they were doing or working on didn’t matter. The Leslie bug had to be fixed. Benzies demanded that they focus on the things he deemed most important at all times. This included quality assurance and game testing. Jamie believed that, with Everywhere — BARB’s first project — Benzies would demand new features be added to the game faster than they could be properly implemented. Unfortunately, this haphazard work style, where there is no clear vision and new features are introduced before they are ready, is a common story we have heard about development cycles that burn out developers, regardless of the end result’s success.
The result was weeks of crunch time for the developers. According to Peloso, people felt that they were just being ordered to contribute a lot to the company without receiving much in return. Another former developer, Isaac Hudd, said that, in the run-up to the launch, everything piled up at once. As soon as one bug was fixed, new ones appeared. Hudd said this unsettled the team. They saw the mood deteriorating and small arguments arising. People were working day and night and started to wonder what the point of it all was.
According to the BBC, Benzies and the BARB management team take full responsibility for MindsEye. They added that the studio is working to compensate players and release the game they envisioned, which players are eagerly awaiting. However, former developers who spoke with the BBC do not believe the game will ever be completed. In July, BARB informed players that updates to MindsEye might be less frequent. The last update was on September 25, and it is unclear when the next one will be.
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