Leslie Benzies has been making videogames since he was 11 years old. “And for 26 years professionally now,” he adds. Those latter years span the entire 3D renaissance of GTA at Rockstar, along with LA Noire and the first Red Dead Redemption, right through to the advent of GTA Online. “And this is probably the most ambitious project that I’ve ever worked on.” Given Benzies’ back catalogue, that is no small claim. But after a day at the Edinburgh offices of the studio he runs today, Build A Rocket Boy, where talent both from the Rockstar days and from across the breadth of the industry have spent more than six years and many millions of pounds making Everywhere, we’re rather inclined to believe him.
As we’re taken on a tour of Everywhere’s many, many facets, we catch occasional flashes of the familiar: the pop-cultural melting pot of Fortnite; the between-battle hangout spaces of Destiny; the tools for player expression provided by Minecraft, Roblox and Dreams; the openworld playground and endless diversions delivered by GTA Online. If this seems like a random grab-bag of components, we’re assured that it’s all held together by a single vision – one that Benzies has had in his head since the very beginning of the project, in 2016, when he found himself unexpectedly striking out on his own after parting ways with Rockstar under unusual, and legally contested, circumstances. (We won’t detail those here – you can easily look up the specifics if you missed the story at the time.)
Today, Benzies seems sanguine about the events that have brought him to this point. “We’ve been lucky enough to have been making great games for a long time,” he says of his team at Build A Robot Boy. (Everyone here calls it BARB, like the woman’s name.) Now he wants to repay that good fortune, and pass it along to the next generation of 11-year-olds enchanted by the medium and its possibilities. “When you ask the younger generation these days what they want to do when they grow up, a lot of them say ‘make videogames’,” Benzies notes. “They don’t say doctor, nurse, train driver, fighter pilot – they say make videogames. So we see that as our responsibility. We want to take all those skills and tools that we’ve used to make videogames over the years, and give them to the players.”
In order to achieve this goal, Benzies and his team here, and at BARB’s Budapest and newly opened Montpellier offices, are making not just one but two videogames, side by side. But we’ll get to that in good time. First, to the city of Utropia.
As the name suggests, Utropia is a nice place to hang out. Visually, it’s a mashup of Ancient Roman forum, science-fiction arcology and idealised university campus, where literal ivory towers, their architecture bent into organic curves, overlook well-maintained lawns. Art directors Thomas Woode and Sebastian Livall throw out visual inspirations at a clip: Syd Mead, atompunk, ’60s and ’70s comic books, Tomorrowland. (The film? the theme park? The music festival? Looking around, honestly, it could be any or all of the above.)
All these influences have been picked to help communicate positivity, they tell us, to reinforce that this is a “grief-free” social space where people can gather. We spot hooded robotic types who’d look at home in Destiny’s Tower, and people dressed in a futuristic spin on ’90s sportswear who look more ready for a Charli XCX gig. There are cyberpunk visors, and Mad Max crash helmets, and colourful haircuts that defy gravity in the grand anime tradition. One person, we’re pretty sure, is just wearing a baggy jumper.
These costumes are all player-selected, naturally, and customisable. The sheer variety on show is one of the reasons
