What Leslie Benzies, game director of numbered GTA titles, is doing now. From leaving Rockstar to working on MindsEye

At the recent State of Play, which took place on February 13, 2025, we saw a trailer for MindsEye. The game is being created by Leslie Benzies, the game director of Vice City, San Andreas, as well as the third, fourth and fifth parts of the GTA series. In this article, we will tell you what the developer has been doing since leaving Rockstar.

First, it is worth saying a few words about who a game director is. We are talking about a person who leads the development and creative process, and also ensures that programmers and designers do not go beyond the established framework. You could say that this is the equivalent of a film director for video games. Of course, his decisions are not final and can be revised by the publisher. However, the success of the project is largely due to the game director.

The GTA series has dozens of games. Among them are the original PS1-era dilogy, projects for the Game Boy Advance and PlayStation Portable portable consoles, as well as various add-ons and re-releases. However, the most successful parts are the third, fourth and fifth, as well as Vice City and San Andreas. Leslie Benzies worked on them as a game director, game designer and producer. In other words, he led the development from the stage of discussing the first ideas to the release of the final version on disks.

On September 1, 2014, Benzies went on sabbatical, and a year and a half later it was announced that he was leaving the company. According to Leslie, he was kicked out of Rockstar so as not to share the profits, and was not paid the required $150 million. He sued Take-Two Interactive. The hearings continued until February 2019, after which the case was closed. The terms of the agreement were not disclosed.

In January 2017, Benzies opened several new companies at once. We are interested in Royal Circus Games, which was later renamed Build a Rocket Boy. It is the one that develops games for PC and current consoles. The first project was announced on January 26, 2017. It's called Everywhere, which can be considered a reference to the city of Anywhere City, where the action of GTA 2 took place.

Later, it was announced that this was not a specific game, but a creative platform, an analogue of Roblox, only for older users. It is on it that the third-person action game MindsEye will be released.

MindsEye looks like a classic GTA, the action of which unfolded in the near future (another parallel with Grand Theft Auto 2). Combat and reconnaissance drones have already become part of our everyday life, air taxis and chips have only just begun to be implemented, so this is a matter of the near future. And the appearance of androids with assault rifles on the battlefield will still have to wait. We have seen chases in sports cars and shootouts using cover in hundreds of games, including those developed by Benzies himself.

Elements of Cyberpunk 2077 and Watch_Dogs, which are proposed to dilute the usual GTA mechanics, no longer look fresh today. It seems like a good B-grade project. Perhaps we'll get a surprise and Leslie will implement a number of new ideas that he's had in recent years. However, for now, his project looks like a way to pass the time until Grand Theft Auto 6 comes out. MindsEye is set for release in the summer of 2025.

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Are you looking forward to MindsEye? Or do you think Leslie Benzies is headed for a flop this time? Share your opinions in the comments!