Long-time Grand Theft Auto producer Leslie Benzies had a very acrimonious split with Rockstar Games back in 2016. It resulted in a legal fight, filled with competing allegations, that eventually ended in a confidential agreement in 2019. Last year, his new studio launched a third-person shooter with open-world driving called MindsEye that ended up being the worst-reviewed game of 2025. And yesterday, the CEO of Rockstar’s parent company Take-Two appeared to take a subtle shot at the failed enterprise.
“Making hits seems to get harder and harder and harder as entertainment industries mature,” Strauss Zelnick said during remarks at the TD Cowen 54th Annual Technology, Media & Telecom Conference. “The folks at Rockstar seem to be able to make these massive hits, and lots of other people have tried. Lots and lots, including former Rockstar employees. And so far, they haven’t been able to do it.”
It’s unclear who else “former Rockstar employees” could be referring to in this case other than Benzies’ team at Build a Rocket Boy. And while most people probably wouldn’t have put MindsEye in the same league as GTA even before its terrible launch, the former Rockstar producer was certainly making ambitious promises about the game and the high-fidelity competitor to Roblox it was supposed to be a spin-off of.
“We have plans to add multiplayer, [and] we have plans to make a full open world,” he said of Build a Rocket Boy’s plans for MindsEye in an interview just before it released. “And of course, we’ve also got to look at what players are creating, and incorporate that into our plans. Given the ease of the tools, we think there’s going to be a high percentage of players who will jump in and give it a pop, see how it feels. Hopefully, some will create compelling content we can then promote and make that part of our plans to push to other players.”
There is also the studio’s own bizarre ongoing beef with outside forces it alleges were purposefully trying to ruin the game. In a meeting after it launched, Benzies reportedly blamed MindsEye‘s poor reception in part on internal and external saboteurs. Even prior to launch, Build a Rocket Boy co-CEO Mark Gerhard was claiming that people online speaking negatively about the game may have been paid to do so. “100%…doesn’t take much to guess who,” he said in a comment many interpreted to be a reference to Rockstar. Gerhard has since promised some kind of MindsEye 2.0 comeback.
Zelnick, in his remarks this week, added that just because no one else has made a GTA-sized hit yet doesn’t mean it won’t happen and come from some team outside of Rockstar. “Doesn’t mean they can’t in the future, by the way,” he said. “We’re always running scared. But it won’t be technology that changes the game. What’ll change is that some extraordinarily creative individual or individuals will show up and do something astonishing. Our goal is to get those people to work within the Take-Two system. If we fail to do that, we fail.”
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