Come for the videogames. Stay to make more of them
Along with remarks such as “I still can’t believe you gave it five” (usually delivered quite late at night during a party at Develop, when barriers have lowered somewhat), one of the things we hear from game developers most often is: “I got my first job in the industry after replying to an advert in Edge!” And to be honest, even after all these times, we still get a buzz out of it. How could we not feel good about playing a tiny part in getting someone started in their dream career? It’s the kind of thing that surely motivates Leslie Benzies, formerly one of the linchpins at Rockstar Games, nowadays head of Build A Rocket Boy, a studio with some big ideas.
Benzies is on a mission to create a development environment that will encourage a new generation of videogame-making talent to emerge – it is, in his words, a “responsibility”, no less. Simultaneously, his team is building vast virtual spaces that host a bottomless well of multiplayer games and also provide opportunities for social-centred activity. Then there is a fully fledged singleplayer game presented in a grittier style, with all of the visual excesses expected of a lavish, expensive standalone Unreal Engine 5 showcase. Crucially, all of these things are intertwined.
Elsewhere we call Everywhere, the piece of software at the heart of all this, ‘a new universe of videogames’, but, as Benzies notes in our cover story, ‘videogame’ doesn’t really feel expansive enough to contain the scope of what Build A Rocket Boy is trying to achieve. On the other hand, he rejects the ‘Metaverse’ label, however tempting it is to offer it up.
At some points in our Everywhere demo we’re reminded of Dreams, but our cover game’s reach extends beyond that of Media Molecule’s platform – not only because it isn’t restricted to PlayStation hardware, but because it has been built from the ground up as a multiplayer experience. In that sense, along with so many others, it feels like an exceptionally modern production – enough to inspire a bit of fun with the Edge logo this month, to reflect its convention-breaking identity. Our report begins on p52.