MindsEye’s salvaged Hitman DLC cuts Agent 47, and seemingly a good chunk of its staff, too

Build A Rocket Boy (BARB), the studio behind last year's spectacular catastrophe MindsEye, has apparently gone through yet another round of layoffs, this time cutting senior and other staff. This comes in the wake of the game's ill-fated Hitman collaboration DLC, which was apparently released anyway but without Agent 47's shiny head and barcode.

The DLC, now called Blacklisted, was very obviously meant to be something straight out of the Hitman franchise. It is essentially a standalone mission where, instead of 47, you control Julia Black (should've called her Jane Mindseye), who is on a business visit to Redrock City and aiming to take out two crucial targets. The way the opening sequence plays out and how your target is presented and described by what was almost certainly supposed to be 47's main handler, Diana Burnwood, clearly shows that this was, at some point, a crossover between MindsEye and Hitman.

IO Interactive confirmed as much when it announced that the partnership between it and BARB had come to an end a couple of months ago. The crossover mission was intended to launch in June, but it seems to have been released early and with changes that removed any real semblance of Hitman, even though the structure and the directing remained largely the same.

In the wake of the DLC failing to captivate a broader audience and, in fact, causing probably even a bigger memefest, BARB has apparently laid off senior staff and other developers, which was confirmed primarily through LinkedIn posts. Senior game designer James Tyler said that he was affected by "latest redundancies," alongside an undisclosed number of other staffers, as per a report from Kotaku.

This is yet another round of layoffs done by Build A Rocket Boy, following a very tumultuous year. The studio's chief executive, however, previously noted that BARB was sabotaged by external actors and that the game wasn't bad because of, well, being bad, but was instead under fire due to "internal and external sabotage, 'among other things.'" When I covered the whole ordeal last summer, I noted that MindsEye was merely an overmarketed and overambitious game that simply failed to reach its goals. Exporting the blame onto others, oftentimes unnamed individuals and organizations, just causes the team to overlook those mistakes and issues that led them to create and release such a flawed game, instead of it being a learning experience that'd prevent other projects from meeting the same fate.

But I guess that's just how the cookie crumbles over at BARB. Let's hope their future projects, if any, do happen to emerge, aren't so ill-destined.

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