The way we envision the future has always been fascinating, with views that have been pessimistic or optimistic. In the 1950s, American citizens envisioned a future of skyscrapers, flying cars, robot butlers, and a mass cessation of hostilities. The future, as long as there has been one to imagine, has found itself in the mind’s eye of every historical generation.
And that’s what makesMindsEyeunique, not just in the way its development saw the future it envisioned become real life, but also because the game’s vision knew that these views would create this future. ThroughoutMindsEye, developed by Build a Rocket Boy (BARB) and helmed by Leslie Benzies (GTA 3, GTA 4, GTA 5, Red Dead Redemption, and many others), players will contend with their own reality, one envisioned a few years ago as the future. ForGame Rant Advance, we spoke with BARB developers about the original vision, how that vision became more impactful as the world around them changed, and how that vision manifests itself in the final product.
Game Rant Advance Speakers
The rapidly changing pace of popular culture, the world, and technology has always made game development a risk because what is innovative one day can quickly become old hat in a few years. This is partially why gaming trends exist: an innovator comes into the world and studios provide their take on that innovation, whether that’sbattle royale games, hero shooter games, roguelike games, Soulslike games, and so forth. But make no mistake, Build a Rocket Boy intends forMindsEyeto be an innovator.
Putting the Mind’s Eye in MindsEye
The pedigree behind Build a Rocket Boy is impressive, but pedigree requires application in the right places at the right times. Luckily, it’s easy to see how Benzies' pedigree can represent Build a Rocket Boy. Benzies previously served as producer or executive producer onGTA 3-5, Manhunt, Red Dead Redemption, andL.A. Noire, all of which envisioned a future at their hearts. The entireGrand Theft Autoseries is known for its satirizationof Americana, but that satirization always involved American dreams for the future. By going to the past,Red Dead RedemptionandL.A. Noireexplored how the past moved into the future.Manhunt, in all its darkness, delivers a strong message on the ideas of freedom and corruption.
MindsEyeexplores similar themes with a focus on the future and what it promises, but there is one key difference.Grand Theft Autowas present but mired in satirization;Manhuntwas dark in tone, making it unrealistic to a degree; andRed DeadandL.A. Noireenvisioned the past to create a future.MindsEye is, and always has been, based on futuristic interpretations of the now. However, that’s a little harder to see when watching the game’s trailers because that future quickly became the present, yet when Benzies and Build a Rocket Boy began this venture years ago, it was forward-thinking.
In a priorGame Rant interview withMindsEyedirector Benzies, he told us how the core ideas of the game were conceived years ago. The original concepts ofMindsEyeblended futurism and sci-fi, all with a heavy focus on the technology that makes it possible. As the team moved forward withMindsEye, it turned out that some of these technologies were becoming more and more commonplace. One could trace the advent of AI, for example, over the past couple of years, but it is a prevalent technology today and inMindsEye. Long afterMindsEyebegan development, the future it envisioned then is a little closer to the current now, creating a unique dynamic not only for its development but for the game. As Build a Rocket Boy explains,
“MindsEye reflects and anticipates the current course of humanity. Our goal is to make a game and a world that resonates with current times, that makes you think, without being judgmental.”
Putting Players into the Current Course of Humanity
MindsEyeis not designed to lean heavily into the good or bad of this technology. Instead, it focuses on its ever-present nature in life and the world. It does not judge players for being optimistic or pessimistic about this technology, allowing them to come to their conclusions about the world.MindsEyeanticipates the events of the game as the current course of this technology. Engaging in this world, players take on the role of amnesiac former soldier Jacob Diaz. He has aneutral implant known as the MindsEyethat he received as a reward for excellence in his military service, but it becomes a nightmare for him after “an attack on the electronic device.”
While the negatives of this implant remain to be seen, it does gift Diaz several abilities but also adds another layer of strategy to gameplay.
“Jacob’s implant allows him to control his paired drone companion, which can go places he cannot and therefore access places he wouldn’t be able to get to and fly into danger, protecting his physical body. It has a number of functions that will Jacob as he fights off the enemy and also adds an extra layer of strategy to missions.”
His memory loss and flashbacks lead him toRedrock City, a city representing near-future Americana, surrounded by a vast desert. This desert, however, is just as important as the city. There is an obvious contrast between barren, unpredictable terrain and a high-tech, dense city, but that adds to gameplay. The city gives players “structure, vertical movement, and dense combat spaces,” while the desert gives players the freedom to go on wild romps with vehicles and aerial explorations without the limitations of the city. This almost-Wild West/Civilization separation is important because it reflects a certain difference in ideals, which is also presented to players in the form of tech and government. That friction, BARB says, is “baked into the world.”
As Diaz seeks to regain his memories and the chaos caused by his neural implant, he’ll become caught in the crossfire between Marco Silva and Shiva Vega. Silva is described as a “highly intelligent, binary-thinking tech billionaire who thinks he knows what’s best for the world…who wants to change the course of human evolution,” while Vega is described as a “populist politician with no real unity to her policies other than that they are all somehow designed to profit her personally….whose apparent ambition is tomake Redrock the safest city in the worldand to gain even greater control of its citizens.” These citizens live in a city where robots carry out manual tasks, forcing questions of what that means for the workforce and the consumer, and the algorithm that connects everyone through all-seeing devices, putting these citizens and their creativity, their passions at the beck and call of an invisible mathematic formula. “The city itself is a living experiment in the existential potential of man and machine,” BARB says, also adding,
“The volatile relationship between Silva and Vega – Big Tech and Government – is poised to impact the future of Redrock and its inhabitants as the personal power struggle for the robots' backend systems ratchet up, ultimately only putting the city itself in danger.”
Big Tech and Big Government are Everywhere
In thenear-future Americanaof Redrock City, there is no escaping the presence of Big Tech and Government. They both have their claws in you and think they know what’s best for you, and any defiance is met with hostility. For this omnipresence to seem realistic and not just a piece of exposition, it had to be woven into everything, and BARB set out to do just that. Becoming an “off-the-grid” Nomad living in a barren desert sounds appealing when players have the MindsEye in their head, when Goldfield Lenz tech guides them through the world, when drones and cars work through direct interfaces, when holographic billboards illuminate the streets and target them, when robot workers replace human ones, when deliveries are done via drone and robot instead of Uber and Doordash, and when the entire infrastructure of Redrock screams “give us your data.”
Redrock also features a realistic design, so these features emphasize its connection with the real world.
“We wanted Mindseye to feel natural: in many games, you may feel that an environment has been designed for a video game. This is not the case in MindsEye because it simply … has not! We started from places that look like they’ve been built for their diegetic use and then and only then we start building missions and objectives in them. This is very difficult, of course: try getting in cover behind anything in the real world and you’ll see how hard it is to transform a real place into a battlefield for fun!”
Meanwhile, Vega and Big Government want to keep citizens “safe,” line their own pockets, and regulate everything. The worrying part? Tech is everywhere and in your face, but BARB has been relatively quiet about the rumblings within the Government. Big Tech regales you with lights, but Big Government works from the shadows to keep Diaz and all its citizens under control. Rest assured, the Government has its eyes everywhere too, and its conflict with Big Tech is directly about controlling the masses.
Robots Are at the Heart of the Conflict
While players will need towait forMindsEye’s releaseto understand the full context, we do know that the conflict between Big Tech and Big Government revolves around control of the backend systems for Robots. The Robots that have taken your jobs, the Robots that watch your every move, and the Robots that are terrifying enemies—who should be their master? Vega and Silva both claim dominance there.
I know what you’re thinking: robots feel a little too far-fetched. Except they’re not. Redrock may be near-future Americana, but the future is now with humanoid robots like Tesla’s Optimus Gen 2, Boston Dynamics' Electric Atlas, Unitree’s G1 and H2, UBTech’s Walker S1, and Stardust Intelligence’s Astrobot S1.
MindsEye’s robots represent the possible near-future of many companies' current robotic ventures, but even making them in-game was not simple. “Our robots have been through many iterations to make them fun and spectacular, and it was not an easy task.” Fundamentals were certainly important, but they had to be key to both story presentation andgameplay inMindsEye.
“If you look at our robots in the game, they are incredibly detailed, and every shot destroys a small part of them. On Silva SM-01s, for example, you can shoot almost any part of it independently. On top of that, we introduced a lot of new abilities, like self-destruction, shield mode…And at the very end of our development cycle, when we were happy with robots, we introduced a very impactful drone ability related to robots that we’re sure many players will enjoy. But then again, and it’s very important to us: it’s all about the fundamentals. If it’s satisfying to shoot, then the game will be fun to play. No number of complex features will ever replace the joy of shooting something and seeing it react physically, feeling it in your hands.”
Furthermore, because there are human enemies, it was important that these robots didn’t just seem like metal versions of humans. Indeed, they needed to feel realistic and challenging, human but also not human. Build a Rocket Boy focused on arobot’s interactions with humansto accomplish this, with robots serving as cover for humans, robots synchronizing certain actions with humans, and otherwise robots making their threatening presence in a firefight well-known.
With the capabilities of Big Tech, the control of Big Government, the human armies that follow them, and the robots that reinforce both sides (albeit in an ongoing internal war), Jacob Diaz is certainly an underdog in this fight.
It’s Dangerous to Go Alone
Can Big Tech, Big Government, or AI control or replace humanity? That is a question at the heart of many in the world today, and a question at the heart ofMindsEye.Because it feels worth noting,Build a Rocket Boy’s philosophy is that AI can servebut cannot replace human creativity, with that being a key part of the company’s design philosophy. As developers told us,
“We believe in the pleasure of creating and sharing, and we are of course integrating AI in our design philosophy to support creation, but not to replace it. In a sense, we are about the pleasure of creation: we want our players to access thousands of experiences that have an intention, a design, that are made because somebody had an idea, a dream, not generated slop. So, we will continue designing our products with that philosophy: we believe in AI that supports human creativity, not in AI that replaces it. Think about it: would children have more fun if AI built their Lego creations for them? Wouldn’t they miss the tactile experience of building? Or would they be better off with an AI that proposes construction plans but lets them be the masters of their own creation?”
That may be their answer, but it is not theanswer of Silva, Vega, or Diaz. And, in fact, players are stepping into the role of an amnesiac military protagonist who may not even have an answer. This is Diaz’s story first and foremost, after all, but the choices he makes are not clean-cut. BARB wants to build a game that presents all of these elements but does not judge, and Diaz is the catalyst for this:
“Of course, we play on Jacob’s psyche, what happened to him, how it shaped him as a person. Some of the choices he makes are questionable, and we want the questions about his motivations and mental state to be open questions really. That’s what makes our characters feel very human. They are all so imperfect, so selfish sometimes, and still, their humanity perspires through every cinematic shot, every line of dialogue. At the end of the day, an experiment certainly does not always enhance a person, and it does not always take a failed experiment to break them.”
Diaz is one character in an entire city, and players will encounter others with their own thoughts and beliefs on Big Tech and Big Government. They play an important role as well inMindsEye’s storyand how players connect with the world of Redrock City, so Diaz is an underdog with friends if nothing else.
On Seb
“Compassionate and personable, Seb was Jacob’s younger neighbor in childhood. A big fan of Marco Silva, Seb came to Redrock to join Silva Corp and worked his way up to being a facilities manager. He is keen to impress and naive, both vulnerabilities that Jacob is able to exploit, as Seb offers him somewhere to stay and, more importantly, gets him a job at Silva Corp.”
On Charlie
“Charlie played by Taylor Carter was able to bring a friendly likability to the role, making her sympathetic and she and Jacob build a believable friendship. She has the right combination of confidence and vulnerability which means we care about her when she appears to be in peril.”
On Burt
“Burt is played by Elias Toufexis who is an actor well-versed in playing military characters from roles in video games like Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Blacklist and Splinter Cell: Conviction. He was really able to embrace a severely flawed and extremely dangerous personality, and at the same time treat the role with a certain sense of subtlety and humor which makes Burt one of the most watchable characters in the game.”
MindsEye Continues to Envision the Future
Since theoriginal concept ofMindsEye, Build a Rocket Boy has envisioned a future: logical outcomes for Big Tech and Big Government, but also in the direction it felt the gaming industry was moving.MindsEyeis only one part of that vision, part of three “seamlessly interconnected experiences.“MindsEyeis the explosive action-adventure campaign players will be delving into on June 10, but launching alongside it is also Play.MindsEye and Build.MindsEye.
Play.MindsEye will continue to provide players with new, studio-developed content for the world of Redrock City, whileBuild.MindsEye allows players to develop user-generated contentto tell their own stories. As such,MindsEyeis not just one sandbox with a specific scope telling one story;MindsEyeis a virtually limitless sandbox with a stream of premium and user-generated content where players can tell their own stories in this universe. Speaking to this universe, BARB said,
“With MindsEye, we’re doing something that has never before been seen in a AAA game, where our city serves as the backdrop for many different experiences - think of our city like a film set where numerous differently themed films are shot. This first chapter does not branch storylines, but lays the groundwork for a long-term, multi-title narrative universe. Future installments aim to expand across multiple timelines, universes, and story arcs, enabling broader narrative complexity and convergence in the years to come.”
MindsEye, no doubt, has ambition and vision. Whether it ends up being a prophetic look into the near future remains to be seen, but ultimately, it’s easy to understand what’s in the mind’s eye of Build a Rocket Boy.
