There’s a moment in the latest MindsEye trailer, released today alongside the news of its midsummer release date, that feels distinctly familiar. As some wonderfully billowy explosions roar, muscle cars tear through traffic and machine guns thunder on, a helicopter drops low over the action, sun setting melodramatically in the background. And the reflection of a city, searingly sharp above more racing cars and scorched tarmac, shines off the side of its ultra-polished fuselage. This is the future of video games, that reflection almost seems to declare. Only, it’s the future as imagined by 2013, where the height of the craft remains a sense of bombast, polish, and ultra-fidelity – and crucially, a question of how accurately it can recreate another craft, in cinema. In other words: a world where the future looked like Grand Theft Auto.
The developers at MindsEye studio Build a Rocket Boy, for their part, would probably rather avoid those comparisons. Speaking with Adam Whiting, assistant game director at BARB (and formerly of GTA’s Rockstar North), GTA remains the elephant in the room, particularly with studio founder Leslie Benzies’ history as president of Rockstar North in mind. But Whiting is, naturally, most animated when talking about MindsEye’s particular, almost old school sensibilities in linear storytelling.
Since GTA 5 landed with its big, blockbuster bang in the early 2010s, gradually a kind of pushback has formed against the once widely-adopted ambition of games to be more like films. Despite the lingering bombast of the classic six-hour Call of Duty campaign, the days of almost-on-rails action flicks like Uncharted are largely behind us, here in 2025, with the GTA future one that took the fork in the road towards open worlds, shared spaces, battle royales and user-generated content (or UGC), as well as all the many other pluralist forms video game stories can take, as opposed to concentrating even harder on the mission of becoming the ultimate playable film. Even the game-long oner of 2018’s God of War – easy to forget as a key sales pitch at the time – would likely get more eye-rolls than dropped-jaws if it was given the same prominence in marketing beats today.
Without doubt, that pluralism is for the better. But the reality of course is that like all wider trends, these never fully dominate nor fully go away, and for Whiting the pendulum has perhaps swung just a bit too far in one direction. “Ultimately games are great mechanisms to tell really meaningful stories, really powerful stories, and stories that the players can immerse themselves in because they’re interactive,” he said.
“I think there’s ways to engage an audience with a video game that you can’t necessarily do with a movie or a TV show, because you’re not passively viewing it, you’re actually interacting and engaging with the characters and the narrative, and I think there’s something really kind of powerful about that.”
This is part of where the slightly old school sense comes in with MindsEye. The game is on the shorter side, by modern standards, in around the 15 hour region, and despite what the team has described as a form of “faux open world” elsewhere, it is fundamentally a linear narrative. It’s an increasingly familiar refrain now, as the pendulum slowly starts to swing back once more – S-Game, the studio behind the upcoming Phantom Blade, expressed a similar sentiment to us just a few days ago.
“I understand that the landscape has changed, and. You know, games are so expensive to make that I think that people are trying to build like, you know, big life service games,” Whiting said.
“But I think there’s something to be said about just like, a really meaningful, well paced, really well constructed, well crafted story that players can immerse themselves in, that’s that’s got moments of tension, character development, tender moments, and then moments of spectacle and drama,” Something pitched for that moment when you are, “at the end of a long day at the office, or whatever it is you’re doing with your days, just sitting at home and enjoying something that’s delivering a meaningful, well paced story that’s respectful of your time as well.”
Part of this is also just down to where you put your attention as a developer, he explains, implying that where studios have moved away from taking film as inspiration, perhaps a little might have been lost. While he agrees there was, “years ago, this idea of trying to chase movies, trying to make things feel like films, because that was a more ‘legitimate’ art form,” as he put it, “I think now we’ve gone too far in the other way. I love cinema and films, and I think a lot of people do. There’s something to be said about framing, and the way that we use the camera, and stuff like that in cinematics and in gameplay.”
That’s partially because in video games, “you can stick a camera anywhere. But then it has this kind of like, whacky quality to it, where your brain’s just like, ‘oh’. But that’s because we’re used to seeing shots and angles from where people can physically place a camera, right? And whilst it’s always amazing when some great cinema auteur does something crazy with the camera, and you’re like ‘Oh wow’, and that stands out, it’s because everything else is so fixed,” he explained.
“I think games sometimes go too far in the opposite direction, and then it kind of loses that kind of grounded- that sense of realism, that cinematic quality. I think that’s something not many games are doing, and it’s something I as a player really love. Again, it’s this idea that the games landscape changes, and people aren’t making games like this anymore. And I don’t know why, because I love them, and I think a lot of people do.”
As the conversation continues, naturally mind mind drifts back to GTA, and the many overlaps between that series and the themes of MindsEye – crime, corruption, third-person guns and cars and helicopters, and a dusty, fictional American city of the future, that does really remind me an awful lot of LA. I put it to Whiting that this feels like a style or collection of themes the new studio is clearly drawn to, in the same way – to stick to the topic of cinema – a director like Martin Scorsese keeps coming back to themes of crime or greed, and the many ways it doesn’t pay. For Whiting, perhaps intentionally avoiding too many comparisons here, this is just a coincidence.
“I think when it comes to developing the story,” he said, “it was this case of certain things that were happening in society and in culture that we just found particularly interesting. And keep in mind: we started building this many years ago, and at the time, some of the themes that are front and centre in the game now were almost bordering on science fiction.” When it comes to “themes of AI and technology, and greed and corruption,” he said, “I think they’re things that are just universal stories.”
Another theme, meanwhile, that you could perhaps trace through Benzies’ history – as “a visionary,” as Whiting put it – at Rockstar, and again here with Build a Rocket Boy, is a fixation on the USA. MindsEye’s story of an oligarchal tech company heavily intertwined with the city’s government echoes reality rather dramatically.
“I’ve always loved America and American culture,” Whiting said, when I asked about returning to that perspective of reflecting US culture in a game made over here in the UK. “I think sometimes, if you’re inside something, you’re kind of looking from the inside out,” he said. “You can’t take it all in. But from an outsider looking at something, you can kind of see the whole thing, if that makes sense. I think that’s why often it’s an interesting thing to explore, because you kind of see everything for the positives and the negatives.”
The US, he’s keen to emphasise, “is a really wonderful country full of wonderful people. And yeah, again, it seems to be at the forefront of many topics, whether it’s technology or cultural things.” All this makes for “rich fodder for telling stories, and having interesting characters. I think it’s an interesting place and setting. Using that as a setting just naturally lends itself to being able to tell interesting, slightly abstract stories, because it’s a kind of place where everything’s happening all at the same time.” That’s as opposed to somewhere like England or Scotland, where you might have to be “a bit more restrained – but again maybe that’s because I’m inside that culture, so I can’t appreciate it as a whole.”
All of this remains wrapped, still somewhat enigmatically, in Everywhere, the unusual metaverse-like platform also in the works at Build A Rocket Boy that’ll allow for UGC – including reworked missions, and plug-and-play assets built by the developer – alongside these developer-made games like MindsEye itself.
Whiting emphasised that the project was still very much happening, despite things going rather quiet since our demonstration of Everywhere in 2023, though was coy on how those UGC elements might play out when it comes to launch. “We’ll be talking about that in more detail soon,” he said. In some senses, that brings MindsEye full-circle: the linear, focused, highly glossy, playable-movie vision for what video games can be on the one hand. And a bold play at something much vaster, stranger, and more curiously democratic on the other.
