The pre-release saga of MindsEye, the debut game from former Rockstar Games stalwart Leslie Benzies and his Build a Rocket Boy studio, has taken another strange twist. As noticed today by Eurogamer, Build a Rocket Boy's chief financial officer and chief legal officer have both left the company, just a week ahead of MindsEye's release.
Former chief legal officer Riley Graebner, who joined Build a Rocket Boy in 2022 and also served as chief operating officer until April 2024, announced his departure from the studio in a message posted to LinkedIn.
"After three and a half years my time at BARB has come to a close," Graebner wrote. "I’m proud of what we’ve accomplished. During that time we more than doubled the size of the company to over 450 employees. We launched multiple products worldwide. We built the legal team and legal ops infrastructure from the ground up, working to systemize and automate.
"I’m beyond excited for what’s next—but currently operating in stealth mode for a while longer. Stay tuned."
CFO Paul Bland didn't make any sort of public declaration about leaving BARB, but updated his LinkedIn profile to indicate that he'd parted ways with the company in June. Somewhat oddly, he seems to have subsequently changed his LinkedIn page: The Paul Bland page on the site (which I successfully visited earlier today) is gone, but the account itself remains available, at a different URL, under the name Paul B. I have no idea what to make of that, but it's weird.
The whole thing is weird, really. Executives come and go, it's true, but losing two C-suiters, effectively at the same time, and literally a week before the launch of the big thing you've been working on for years—well, it's not a very good look, is it?
There's no indication that anything untoward is going on behind the scenes, but even so their departures have caused an understandable ripple amongst some of the MindsEye community. As one person put it in the MindsEye Discord, "Two major players inside the company just resigned. That's concerning!" I'm inclined to agree.
Similar sentiments can be seen on the MindsEye subreddit, where people are already somewhat less than enthusiastic about the game due primarily to a relative dearth of information about it. Back when the metaverse was still a thing, MindsEye was billed as an experience taking place within the Everywhere platform, which has been kicking around—equally ill-explained—since 2016. But I know even less about Everywhere than I do about MindsEye at this point, and it seems to have fallen off the radar: The Everywhere website, for instance, now redirects to a MindsEye site—which is just a trailer and purchase links.
"They’ve done such an incredibly poor job explaining this game I still have no clue what it even is," redditor Greatnes wrote. "It’s just buzzwords and features with nothing linking them or explaining them. I’ve never had this issue with a game before with not even knowing what it is. Game is out in 13 days and they don’t seem interested in actually showing it off beyond carefully scripted gameplay trailers that don’t explain anything."
(MindsEye is, for the record, "a narrative driven, single-player action-adventure thriller" with an estimated 15-hour campaign—it looks a bit like GTA, but don't expect anything on that scale.)
The departures of Build a Rocket Boy's CFO and CLO come less than a week after the company's co-CEO Mark Gerhard caused a stir by claiming publicly that the negative reactions to MindsEye were part of a "concerted effort to trash the game and the studio" ahead of its release, being financed by an unnamed entity. That was not great either, and also very weird.
MindsEye is set to launch on June 10. I've reached out to Build a Rocket Boy for comment and will update if I receive a reply.
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