Sam Houser, one of the driving forces behind the rise of the Grand Theft Auto series and Rockstar North, has a rallying cry. Or at least he did. When things went wrong, when one of Rockstar’s big projects ran into trouble, or when a problem was particularly persistent, Houser would give an internal bat signal and beg, “Bring me the Benz!”
The Benz is one Leslie Benzies, who started his career at the legendary DMA Design before becoming arguably the most important figure in Grand Theft Auto history. Benzies assembled the team that would make Grand Theft Auto 3 and would direct and produce every Grand Theft Auto through Grand Theft Auto 5 (and online), as well as serving as president of Rockstar North. He may not have the fame of a Hideo Kojima or Shigeru Miyamoto, but Leslie Benzies is one of the most important creative forces in video game history.
Benzies left Rockstar North in 2014, initially on a sabbatical, before his departure was officially announced in early 2016. He ended up in a lawsuit with Take Two over unpaid royalties, settled in 2019 and founded several companies, including Build A Rocket Boy, the developer of Everywhere. I focused on Benzies, but Everywhere started development with other senior ex-Rockstar North types.
That doesn’t mean Everywhere is an inevitable masterpiece — you can’t attribute Grand Theft Auto’s genius to a handful of individuals — but the brains behind Everywhere have one of the most impressive track records in the industry, and the latest project they’ve got. worked on remains the most successful entertainment product of all time.
The development of Everywhere began in 2016, years before the word “metaverse” became a personal obsession of tech CEOs everywhere and the blockchain began to infect the edge of entertainment. A lot has changed since Everywhere was just a mysterious name.
Two years ago, Everywhere probably wouldn’t have been received as another sighing attempt to build the metaverse. And the thing is, Everywhere doesn’t quite resemble the many other metaverse plays that are going on, rather than an adult version of Roblox. We’ve all heard of Roblox by now, even though we don’t know much about it, but for most of its history, Roblox was pretty obscure. It first left beta in 2006 and did well enough to be a going concern, but it didn’t gain widespread traction until the early 2010s and became a real hit in the mid-decade.
Roblox is a game making platform and therein lies its appeal: it is endless, constantly changing and able to constantly surprise its users. There has been legitimate criticism of the ecosystem Roblox Corporation has built around the platform, which some argue exploits its young user-creators with an unfair distribution of revenue, and is more disturbingly linked to events such as the kidnapping of a 13-year-old girl. It has also been in the news recently in an absurd feud with, of all people, Kim Kardashian.
The company is now trying to position Roblox as a growing adult audience, resisting the perception that it’s “just for kids.” It is, and every time I’ve gambled in Roblox, the players around me and the kind of games they make seem to suggest that the community remains overwhelmingly on the young side. I can never see Roblox because it is becoming a global adult entertainment platform, and if it does I will happily eat my words.
Mass effect
Anywhere could be a platform with open elements, in the sense that users can import and create assets from already existing ones.
This is why Everywhere’s pitch makes so much sense to me. The “user-created and curated adult entertainment platform” niche, which is so large that the niche may under-sell it, is currently woefully undervalued. Probably the closest thing currently in existence is the PlayStation-exclusive Dreams, which is both a remarkable piece of generative software and also fatally undermined by its limited distribution.
Even if Dreams were to come to PC, though, it’s an “artistic” take on what a creation platform should be. It’s beautiful and ethereal and people can create the most incredible miniature worlds there.
But Everywhere advertises itself with guns and cars and sci-fi cities for the same reason video game magazines always had those things on the cover. Everywhere does not want to appeal to a limited group of makers and experimenters with an excellent aesthetic taste. It dreams of total saturation of the mass market, aiming to reach that critical mass of player-makers who will make the platform a self-sustaining destiny.
One of the particularly interesting aspects of this is how vastly different the art styles showcased in the teaser are. It ends in some typically detailed Unreal Engine 5 faces so you can admire the pores and wrinkles, but the different scenes it shows look like both different games and are built with different aesthetics that are obviously as simplistic or so can be detailed as desired. I think these art shifts are trying to point to something really big, which is that Everywhere could be an open element platform, in the sense that users can import assets and create from pre-existing elements.
This may also explain a recent minor controversy over Everywhere, which arose from Build a Rocket Boy promoting some jobs that required blockchain knowledge. This led to speculation linking it to crypto or NFT elements.
“We’re seeing a conversation about NFTs/cryptos being caused by some of our open positions on our website,” a studio representative wrote on the game’s subreddit. “These are research positions, because we don’t like to reject new technologies just because others haven’t figured it out yet. We’re building Everywhere on Unreal Engine 5, not the blockchain. We’re creating a new world for players, where we come together to play, watch, create, share and much more!
“We hope this helps clarify some of the speculation on this topic.”
Crypt number?
hmm. First, any association with these technologies is currently largely toxic to games. Everything has been kept a secret for so long, and there has been so much mystery about it, but it’s remarkable how quickly the studio addressed this concern. Second, it may be true that Everywhere isn’t built with blockchain technology at its core, but it can allow makers to integrate such technologies if they want to.
Sometimes it’s interesting to note what a developer doesn’t say, no matter how much it is. Everywhere is clearly going to be a very social experience with a large multiplayer element. It will also be a platform that will not function offline. But the label the developers aren’t putting on it is MMO – because that would suggest a coherence and a more unified experience that I don’t think Everywhere ever wanted to deliver.
Put a gun to my head and I think Everywhere is going to be an incredibly flexible creation platform that’s rich in features and with a ton of resources: but then, within certain limits, it operates as an open platform. It will have a contiguous way of taking small groups of players through different experiences and briefly crossing them with more than groups in a non-obnoxious way. Roblox seemed like the most obvious comparison, but now that I’m spitting, I imagine a user journey closer to a YouTube binge.
The Everywhere site currently has a nice little 3D logo that you can manipulate with your cursor, and a short FAQ stating it will be out in 2023. The official description says it “seamlessly blends gameplay, adventure, creation and discovery”. We’ll find out soon enough what some of the biggest design talents in the industry have been dreaming about all along, and don’t be surprised if this thing really is everywhere in a few years.
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