In light of MindsEye recently getting its Blacklisted update, which, according to CEO and CTO Mike Gerhard, involves the player hunting down characters based on those responsible for the “sabotage” of the game, more details about the troubled studio – Build A Rocket Boy – have been revealed. In an interview with Kotaku, developers from the studio, including industry veteran and lead animator on MindsEye, Chris Wilson, discussed his time at the studio.
“Sometimes traumatic experiences can bring people closer, right?” said Wilson. “But people… they’re embarrassed about it. People don’t want to talk about it. They don’t want to say that they were part of the project or worked there.”
Wilson’s comments were joined by those of former lead games analyst Ben Newborn, who revealed that the staff at Build A Rocket Boy had already been suffering from a culture of crunch before the release of MindsEye. This, he noted, led to “horrific mental and even physical illness.”
“Even before the disastrous launch of MindsEye, staff had suffered months of crunch, resulting in some horrific mental and even physical illnesses, beyond the typical widespread burnout,” he said.
Wilson also discussed how Build A Rocket Boy handled crunch, noting that it went on for quite a bit of time. The cinematics team, for instance, had been in crunch from June “until a good few months later” without being appropriately paid for the work.
“It was hard for a lot of people. It did go on for a considerable amount of time[…] Some teams were on crunch for quite some time. In cinematics, we were probably in crunch from June until a good few months later…no overtime pay or anything like that.”
“Eight hours was the minimum requirement, but people were doing way more for sure,” Wilson said. “I was doing way over an additional eight hours a week…there were people who were certainly not appreciative of having to work those extra hours, but a lot of people just had to bite the bullet. I think Cinematics were crunching for somewhere between six to nine months. Some people racked up a lot of extra hours, and that’s outside of the general day-to-day stuff. People were already doing extra hours, and then they introduced the crunch as well.”
When asked about his decision to speak out against the studio’s policy publicly, Wilson said that the leadership’s use of Teramind monitoring software, along with its lack of respect for the development team, ended up being the proverbial straws that broke the camel’s back.
“Basically, the Teramind monitoring and the blatant lack of respect for the staff, where they were not being honest about the reasons for the monitoring, why they started it, when they started it—that was like finding that nail in the coffin for me,” he said.
MindsEye is available on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S. For more, check out our review. Also, take a look at the lawsuit filed by the studio’s employees about leadership violating their privacy by making use of Teramind.
