Grand Theft Auto made him a legend. His latest game was a disaster

Mr Benzies is well-known for his work at Rockstar Games where he was a senior figure on the Grand Theft Auto (GTA) action-adventure series, and regarded by many as a key architect of its success.

He left in 2016, three years after the record-breaking launch of GTA 5, sparking a legal row over unpaid royalties that was settled out of court.

In the same year, he set up the company that would become Build a Rocket Boy (Barb). By the end of 2024, it had grown to 448 employees.

Most were based at its main office - a former casino in Leith, Edinburgh - but the company also had studios in Budapest and in the French city of Montpellier.

Former staff say salaries were competitive, the company allowed remote working, and their response to the Covid-19 pandemic was good.

With Mr Benzies at the helm, Barb attracted a lot of interest and, according to documents UK companies are legally required to publish online, had managed to attract more than £233m of investment by 2024.

It had also spent large amounts of money without releasing any products.

Between 2020 and 2024, the company posted losses totalling £202.6m, with its largest for a single year - £59.1m - coming in 2023.

Barb's first project was Everywhere, described by one former employee, Jamie (not their real name), as a multiplayer role-playing game (RPG) based in an open-ended, futuristic city.

"I thought we had something quite special," says Jamie, who left the company in 2022.

To fulfill the vision, Jamie says, Mr Benzies requested new ideas and features be added at breakneck speed - too fast for them to be properly implemented.

The studio's main focus would eventually shift to MindsEye - a game originally intended to be offered as an experience within Everywhere.

"Leslie never decided what game he wanted to make," says Jamie. "There was no coherent direction".

This style of working "plagued the project from the start", they say, and would be a sign of things to come.

An open letter, recently signed by 93 current and former Barb employees, alleges studio management made "radical changes" without properly consulting workers.

Former lead data analyst Ben Newbon says it was common for staff to be caught off-guard by "knee-jerk" decisions from upper management without proper explanation.

The letter further alleges that leadership "repeatedly refused to listen" to its experienced workforce.

Ben, whose team was tasked with collecting feedback and presenting it to management, says there was rarely any response when they flagged issues.

"A lot of the points that we were hammering home on were just ignored and just never actioned," he says.

His former colleague, associate producer Margherita "Marg" Peloso, says the studio's culture also discouraged individuals from speaking out.

Marg, who uses gender-neutral pronouns, says their own attempts to raise concerns were "laughed at" in meetings with bosses.

Staff also accuse Mr Benzies of micro-managing the studio, a process allegedly illustrated in a video uploaded to the official MindsEye YouTube account.

It shows the director instructing an onlooker to make a note of an issue he has noticed as he plays the game.

Developers say this was a regular occurrence, resulting in what Ben and Marg claim were known within the studio as "Leslie tickets".

Jamie says they also heard them referred to as "Leslie bugs" or, simply, "Leslies".

Developers told Newsbeat these could range from minor cosmetic issues to instructions to ditch whole missions from the game, and there was an expectation that these would be given top priority.

"It didn't matter what else you were doing, what else was being worked on," says Ben, "the Leslie ticket had to be taken care of."

Jamie says the practice introduced instability and prevented teams from "taking ownership of their work".

Developers say the decision to launch MindsEye in June 2025 prompted a period of "crunch" - a games industry term for mandatory overtime.

They say this meant an extra eight hours of unpaid overtime a week for the majority of staff - although some employees were excused from it.

Marg says the crunch began in mid-February and continued into May, with workers eventually being promised seven hours of leave per eight hours' overtime, to be taken after MindsEye's release.

"People just felt like they were being commanded to give a lot to the company without too much in return," says Marg.

Ben alleges that some departments, such as the quality assurance team, were particularly affected, with some staff suffering physically and mentally as a result of the "stress and pressure".

Former audio programmer Isaac Hudd says "mistakes started piling up" during crunch, and says "regressions", where one team would fix a bug only for another to unwittingly bring it back to life, became increasingly common.

"And it does mess with you," he says. "You really do start to see the morale go down, the little arguments starting to happen.

"People are burning the candle at both ends and starting to think: 'What's the point?'"

Marg says many at the studio expected MindsEye to receive a negative reception on launch, describing the approach to its release as "everybody holding their breath".

Nevertheless, staff gathered in Barb's Edinburgh studio to celebrate MindsEye's launch on 10 June.

Marg says: "Everybody was drinking champagne, just having a good time, which was quite… heartwarming, I guess.

"At the same time, it really felt like this is the last good thing that's going to happen."

The celebrations were short-lived.

Barb had not shared advance copies of MindsEye with reviewers, but when early impressions of the game began to surface, the mood soured.

Players who bought the game on release day encountered major performance issues and reported various bugs, including pedestrians that appeared to walk on air and, in one heavily-memed example, one character's face appeared to melt due to a graphical glitch.

Twitch streamer CohhCarnage told viewers he was instructed to cancel a sponsored launch day stream at the last-minute, as word of the game's problems spread.

Audio programmer Isaac says he had maintained some optimism in the run-up to the release, but started to lose hope fairly quickly.

"You were just seeing disastrous review after disastrous review, and thinking 'This isn't gonna go well'," he says.

Marg says the team spent the next two weeks working on "hotfixes" - small, targeted updates to address major issues, until management informed them that they were at risk of being laid off.

This month, between 250 and 300 Barb staff lost their jobs, with the bulk of those roles based in Edinburgh, according to The Independent Workers of Great Britain (IWGB) union's Game Workers Branch.

The union, which put out the open letter on behalf of 93 employees, said it also planned to take legal action against Barb over what it called "disastrous mishandling" of the redundancy process.

Ben, who is a member of the union, says he took voluntary redundancy, but fellow members Marg and Isaac, who were laid off, say they were unhappy with how their departures were handled.

In a statement, Barb said staff had "poured passion, creativity, and hard work into our games and our studio", adding that it was "deeply saddened" and "didn't anticipate having to make redundancies after launch".

It said it approached the redundancy process with "care and transparency", meeting all of its obligations, and was "committed to learning and growing" from former employees' feedback.

In response to complaints about studio leadership, workplace culture and claims of "internal and external" forces working against the studio, Barb said: "Leslie and the entire senior management team take full responsibility for the initial launch [of MindsEye].

"The version of the game that was released did not reflect the experience our community deserved."

It said it remained committed to "ultimately delivering MindsEye as the game we always envisioned - and the one players are excited to play".

The statement added that the studio had already rolled out updates to address issues, and was working on "enhancements" and "fresh new content".

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