MindsEye, from former Rockstar developers, wants to revive the tight, linear, cinematic blockbuster game

There’s a moment in the latest MindsEye trailer, released today alongside the news of its midsummer release date, that feels distinctly familiar. As some wonderfully billowy explosions roar, muscle cars tear through traffic and machine guns thunder on, a helicopter drops low over the action, sun setting melodramatically in the background. And the reflection of a city, searingly sharp above more racing cars and scorched tarmac, shines off the side of its ultra-polished fuselage. , that reflection almost seems to declare. Only, it’s the future as imagined by 2013, where the height of the craft remains a sense of bombast, polish, and ultra-fidelity – and crucially, a question of how accurately it can recreate craft, in cinema. In other words: a world where the future looked like Grand Theft Auto.

The developers at MindsEye studio Build a Rocket Boy, for their part, would probably rather avoid those comparisons. Speaking with Adam Whiting, assistant game director at BARB (and formerly of GTA’s Rockstar North), GTA remains the elephant in the room, particularly with studio founder Leslie Benzies’ history as president of Rockstar North in mind. But Whiting is, naturally, most animated when talking about MindsEye’s particular, almost old school sensibilities in linear storytelling.

Since GTA 5 landed with its big, blockbuster bang in the early 2010s, gradually a kind of pushback has formed against the once widely-adopted ambition of games to be more like films. Despite the lingering bombast of the classic six-hour Call of Duty campaign, the days of almost-on-rails action flicks like Uncharted are largely behind us, here in 2025, with the GTA future one that took the fork in the road towards open worlds, shared spaces, battle royales and user-generated content (or UGC), as well as all the many other pluralist forms video game stories can take, as opposed to concentrating even harder on the mission of becoming the ultimate playable film. Even the game-long oner of 2018’s God of War – easy to forget as a key sales pitch at the time – would likely get more eye-rolls than dropped-jaws if it was given the same prominence in marketing beats today.

Without doubt, that pluralism is for the better. But the reality of course is that like all wider trends, these never fully dominate nor fully go away, and for Whiting the pendulum has perhaps swung just a bit too far in one direction. “Ultimately games are great mechanisms to tell really meaningful stories, really powerful stories, and stories that the players can immerse themselves in because they’re interactive,” he said.