Joining the Everywhere community Discord is, for the most part, a conventional experience. You agree to a set of rules and get access to channels full of fans sharing everything they can find on this mysterious new game from the former president of GTA developer Rockstar North. Actually, he happens to be the first person you speak to. Leslie P. Benzies is the tongue-in-cheek name of the group’s Discord bot that welcomes new sleuths into the fold.
The strange thing about the Everywhere community is that its members are wildly excited for the game not based on what they’ve been shown, but what they’ve dug up themselves. Everywhere is, in the wider popular consciousness, barely more than a name and a set of vague ideas – but the sheer development pedigree of Benzies himself has led to hundreds of fans doing everything they can to find out about his next project.
Benzies was thought to be Rockstar’s “unseen mastermind” during his time at the studio, producing several of its most formative games and directing GTA Online, a game that is still growing its player base and increasing its revenue some eight years after launch. In 2016, he left amid some controversy to found his own studio, Build A Rocket Boy and has been working on Everywhere ever since.
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The Discord is full of ex-pat Rockstar fans who are very fond of Benzies, with memes depicting him as a father figure ready to deliver unto them a new era of gaming innovation, and in one case, a custom hoodie with “The Benz” written on the back. That devotion has led to a mild obsession with discovering exactly what (ahem) The Benz’s next game will actually be.
Admins Nestor and Razor have been following Everywhere since its announcement in 2017, and out of grassroots excitement, they have built Everywhere communities, well, everywhere — across Discord, Reddit, Twitter and Instagram. With over 600 members in the subreddit, it's a relatively modest crew, but that hasn’t stopped a steady flow of excitable headlines and URLs to obscure corners of the internet that might point to clues on the game.
We spoke extensively to Nestor and Razor about what they’ve found so far, and it creates a very intriguing picture of what sounds like an almost absurdly ambitious game. But before we get to that, it’s probably useful to hear what Build a Rocket Boy itself has already told us about Everywhere.
The Official Word on Everywhere
You might not even be aware of Everywhere yet – and you couldn’t be blamed for that. The game is in active development, but there have been no trailers or teasers just yet, never mind gameplay reveals.
Officially, we know that Everywhere will be some kind of MMO thanks to this job listing for a Vehicle Artist, which says the candidate will be responsible for creating “a wide range of vehicle assets to populate an immersive and large MMO experience.” The human faces we can see on the landing page for the game’s website also tease a realistic art style, with the official description calling Everywhere “a game, a community and a new world.” [caption id="attachment_2484169" align="alignnone" width="663"]
One of the few pieces of official art for Everywhere. (Source: Build A Rocket Boy)[/caption]
“In the near future, technology has brought humanity to the precipice of a world shifting change,” it reads. There are those who want to use this technology to advantage only themselves, and those who want to use it to help all humankind. Will we look to the stars? Or stare only at our feet? Will we be inspired? Or live in fear?”
A handful of interviews were conducted to promote the game’s announcement in 2017, revealing vague but important details. Benzies told VentureBeat that the goal for Everywhere was “to create a platform where players can be entertained, and also entertain others while blurring the lines between reality, and a simulated world.”
“I see a future where we don’t reference single or multiplayer — we just choose when we play and if we want to hang out with others or we want to be alone,” he told Polygon. “We’re making “Everywhere” as seamless as possible so players won’t have to think about jumping from mode to mode — except when it helps the gameplay.” With all the pieces put together, the game starts to appear more like a living social platform than anything bound by typical video game genre convention.
Batting away inevitable Grand Theft Auto comparisons, Benzies told Polygon that Everywhere is “very different” from the series to which he gave a good part of his career. “There may be parts of our game that include satire but the tone will be very different and at times our players will be in control of how the tone is set,” he said.
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Ex-Rockstar North lead Matthew Smith, who joined Benzies in founding Build a Rocket Boy, described the game as “more like a social network”, and cryptically added that, “If a future President chose to make policy announcements in Everywhere, that’s something I’d certainly find interesting."
Official channels have been silent for a good few years now, but as of 2020, it at least looks like development has been ramping up. Last September, Build a Rocket Boy raised $40 million in funding for the game from firms such as Netease and Galaxy Interactive. In November, the studio announced that the game had made the leap from the troubled Amazon Lumberyard engine to Unreal Engine to “create a game built on a foundation that will remain at the forefront of the industry for years to come.”
Overall it feels like we’ve heard quite a lot, but learned quite little. Thankfully, beyond these small, often disconnected official details, the Everywhere community has been picking up every potential puzzle piece of information it can find – from patents to hidden websites – and using them to slot together a potential picture of what Everywhere will be. How much of this will turn up on our screens, and how much is simply the experiments of a brand new studio, remains to be seen – but it’s clear that Build a Rocket Boy is trying to live up to its grand promises.