Former GTA producer’s GTA-like shooter will come out before GTA 6

Leslie Benzies, former GTA producer and Rockstar North president, and founder of developer Build A Rocket Boy, unveiled the first gameplay trailer for his upcoming game, MindsEye, coming this summer. The third-person action game is set in a futuristic world “where AI and human greed collide to bring earth to the precipice of collapse,” which sure is a far-fetched sci-fi concept, right? Right? You can check out the trailer, revealed today at PlayStation State of Play, above.

Maybe I’m reading too much into it, but is Benzies working out a few things with his new game? Did his years of working on Grand Theft Auto games make him hate automobiles? He sure blows up a lot of them in the gameplay trailer, too many to be a coincidence. Shoot a million bullets at a bunch of cars and some of ’em are gonna blow up, sure, and some of ’em do, and then more of ’em do, and at one point I swear the main character pretty much stops what he’s doing just to specifically blow up one car in particular.

I’ll say this: the car-blowing-up effects are the best part of the trailer. The rest looks like “We’ve got GTA at home” mixed with “We’ve got Cyberpunk at home” and “We’ve got Watch_Dogs at home.” Not that it doesn’t look fun. Cars, guns, drones, third-person shooting and cover, more drones, more cars, and a desperate guy with a cyber implant in his head. His name isn’t V, though. It’s Jacob.

“MindsEye follows Jacob Diaz, equipped with a mysterious neural implant, the MindsEye, that has left him with disjointed flashbacks of his time in the service,” says a press release sent to PC Gamer. “As Jacob fights to uncover the truth, he is drawn into a world where AI, high-tech experimentation, and unchecked military power impact every step of his journey.”

That journey apparently includes putting automobile insurance companies out of business by exploding everything on four wheels.

Not shown in the trailer or mentioned by Benzies himself during State of Play is Everywhere, which in 2022 was described as a “multi-world game experience that blurs the line between reality and the digital world.” We were told MindsEye would take place inside Everywhere, and for context, this was back when everyone was making promises about the “metaverse,” that next big thing everyone quickly stopped talking about because it was nonsense (now they just talk about AI, the next next big thing, which will continue until the next next next big thing).

In the press release sent to PC Gamer, it only says “MindsEye® is an EVERYWHERE® world,” but that’s it. Does that mean Everywhere, whatever it is (maybe something more like Roblox for adults), won’t be ready when Mindseye launches in summer 2025? I will ask Build a Rocket Boy for clarification about Everywhere and update this story if I learn more.