Leslie Benzies was formerly president of Rockstar North and has worked on various GTA games, including the lead for GTA V’s multiplayer: GTA Online. He has since left the company, in dubious terms.
Ever since, he has now announced a new project that he and his new team will be working one, temporarily titled Everywhere. No concrete details about what the game is all about, but it said to be “a platform where players can be entertained, and also entertain others while blurring the lines between reality and a simulated world”.
One detail we know of is the project will be utilising Amazon’s Lumberyard engine, a free game engine that is based on the Crytek’s CryEngine but with more support with Amazon’s suite of tech including Twitch integration, Amazon Web Services as well as Amazon GameLift, its server hosting service.
So far, Benzies has setup three different studios to be working on Everywhere which are located in Edinburgh, Los Angeles and more recently in Budapest. The new Budapest studio is being headed by Kristoffer Waardahl, fomerly head of Crytek Hungary. The Budapest studio has already housing veteran developers with experience with AAA games, mobile and VR.
It’s good to see Benzies has bounced back into making games, and from all the information we have heard, Everywhere could be something ambitious. GTA Online, the last project he overseen at Rockstar, is still printing money with most of the development resources focusing there. It will be a hard act to follow, but from the sound of things, this might be something big.