A GTA Veteran's Studio Is Reported Closing. The Register Says Active

On 16 and 17 September 2026 the trade press reported that Build A Rocket Boy, the Edinburgh studio founded by Leslie Benzies, was permanently shutting down after a fresh round of layoffs. This desk went to the public register instead. All four Build A Rocket Boy companies at Companies House are listed as Active, the most recent filing on any of them is a confirmation statement recording no updates, and the UK official public record carries no insolvency notice for the name in 2026. That does not make the reporting wrong, and this article says so in terms before it says anything else. What did the trade press actually report? REPORTED. Eurogamer, bylined Kaan Serin, published at an on-page timestamp of "Sept. 16, 2026, 6:49 p.m." with an RSS pubDate of Wed, 16 Sep 2026 18:49:00 +0000, attributed the layoffs to IGN and the closure to Kotaku. Its own sentence, verbatim: Kotaku reports that sources close to the studio claim Build A Rocket Boy is permanently shutting down. Eurogamer also quoted a LinkedIn post by the studio's principal talent acquisition officer, Dan Hawkins, saying he is "seeing BARB through till the very end, helping wrap things up here in the HR department". That page answered HTTP 200 at 227,880 bytes, read at 2026-09-18T03:03:43Z. PC Gamer ran "MindsEye developer Build a Rocket Boy may finally be closing" with an RSS pubDate of Wed, 16 Sep 2026 18:22:31 +0000, HTTP 200 at 2,015,421 bytes. Dexerto followed on 17 September with "Ex-Rockstar boss' studio reportedly shutting down after MindsEye struggles", RSS pubDate Thu, 17 Sep 2026 11:07:21 GMT. Note what those three have in common. One of them says "may", one says "reportedly", and the strongest of them attributes the closure to another outlet's unnamed sources. That is careful reporting of a claim, not an announcement. What does Companies House show for Build A Rocket Boy? CONFIRMED from the primary register, read at 2026-09-18T03:09:18Z to 03:09:58Z. Four UK companies carry the name. All four are Active. CompanyNumberStatusMost recent filing BUILD A ROCKET BOY LTD.SC537252Active6 July 2026, group accounts to 30 September 2025 BUILD A ROCKET BOY GAMES LTD.SC540010Active10 July 2026, confirmation statement with no updates BUILD A ROCKET BOY TECHNOLOGIES LTD.SC544189Active2 September 2026, confirmation statement made on 30 August 2026 with no updates BUILD A ROCKET GIRL LTD.SC612418ActiveNo later filing recorded The individual page and filing history for each was fetched: SC537252 at 36,805 and 66,632 bytes, SC540010 at 36,586 and 63,098 bytes, SC544189 at 36,656 and 64,351 bytes, and SC612418 at 35,581 bytes, all HTTP 200. No administration, liquidation, receivership or strike-off document appears in any of those four filing histories. The control, because a negative is only worth something with one. The same Companies House search results page labels an unrelated company, BOYTEN (BUILDING AND PROPERTY MAINTENANCE) LIMITED, with the suffix "- Liquidation". The register does display that status when it applies. It is not applying it here. Has an insolvency notice been gazetted? CONFIRMED as not found. The Gazette is the UK official public record in which corporate insolvency notices must be published. Its notice feed, queried for the exact phrase "Build A Rocket Boy" and answering HTTP 200 at 10,154 bytes at 2026-09-18T03:09:58Z, returns ten results. The most recent is dated 2025-10-07. Nothing in 2026. Does the register contradict the reporting? No, and anyone telling you it does is misreading both. This is the part of the story that matters most, so it gets said plainly. An Active status at Companies House does not mean a company is trading, has staff, has money or has a future. Directors can decide to wind a business down weeks or months before any document reaches the register. An administration appointment is typically gazetted and filed after the fact, not before it. A studio can be emptying out while its four registered entities sit there in good standing, and that is a completely ordinary sequence of events. So the two accounts are not in conflict. What the register establishes is narrower and checkable: as of 18 September 2026 there is no filed, public, statutory record of insolvency or dissolution for any Build A Rocket Boy company. Which means the words "permanently shutting down" currently rest on unnamed sources at one outlet and on one employee's own wording about wrapping things up. That is worth saying because of how this kind of story usually travels. A closure claim sourced to unnamed people at one outlet gets picked up by a second outlet that attributes it properly, then by a third that drops the attribution, and by the fourth day it is being repeated as a fact with no source attached to it at all. The register is the only surface in this chain that anybody can check, it is free to check, and it currently says Active four times over. The LinkedIn wording is the closest thing to a first-hand statement in the entire set, and even that is not a company announcement. A staff member writing that he is seeing the business through to the end and wrapping things up in the HR department is describing his own job. It is consistent with a closure. It is also consistent with a redundancy round at a company that carries on. Neither this desk nor the outlets reporting it can tell which from that sentence alone. What would have to appear on the register if the reporting is right? This is the useful part for a reader who wants to check it themselves in a month, rather than take anyone's word for it. If a formal wind-up follows, the public record would carry one or more of the following, and none of them is there today: A notice of appointment of administrators filed against one or more of SC537252, SC540010, SC544189 or SC612418, with a matching notice in The Gazette. A resolution for voluntary winding up, or a liquidator's appointment, with the company status on the register changing from Active to Liquidation, exactly as the register already displays for the unrelated company named above. A first Gazette notice under the Build A Rocket Boy name dated later than 2025-10-07. A strike-off application or a compulsory strike-off notice, which would also change the status line. Until one of those appears, the accurate sentence is that the studio is reported to be closing and the register has not yet recorded it. What else the filings show, and what that does not mean CONFIRMED. Three director terminations were filed against BUILD A ROCKET BOY LTD. during 2026: Yat Keung Li effective 14 April 2026, Samuel Eli Englebardt effective 26 May 2026, and Julia Wittlin effective 31 May 2026. UNVERIFIED as to meaning, and this desk is not joining the dots. Directors leave boards for many reasons. Three departures across six weeks in the spring of 2026 are a fact on the register. They are not evidence of anything about September 2026, and nothing in the filings connects them to the closure reporting. A live error in the coverage CONFIRMED, and still live at the moment we read it. Eurogamer's headline and its HTML title tag spell the founder's name "Leslie Benzie's". The body of the same article spells it correctly, "founded by GTA veteran Leslie Benzies". The correct name is Leslie Benzies, former president of Rockstar North and a lead on Grand Theft Auto V. This is small and it is worth flagging for one practical reason: a misspelled name in a title tag is what search engines index, and it is how a wrong spelling propagates into every aggregator that scrapes the headline rather than the copy. What this does not prove It does not prove the studio is not closing. The register lags real-world decisions by design, and this article makes no prediction. It does not prove anyone got anything wrong. Eurogamer, PC Gamer and Dexerto all attribute and hedge. The closure claim is sourced to Kotaku's unnamed sources and is labelled as such by the outlets carrying it. It does not establish a headcount. No number of affected staff is printed here, because no primary source this desk reached carries one. It does not connect the 2026 director departures to anything. They are on the register. That is all. It is a snapshot. Every register reading above is stamped at 2026-09-18 between 03:09:18Z and 03:09:58Z, and any of it can change the moment a document is filed. Nothing here concerns Grand Theft Auto VI, Rockstar Games or Take-Two. The founder's history at Rockstar North is why this story reaches a GTA desk at all. It is not evidence about the current game or the current company. For the current state of the Rockstar labour story, which is a separate matter before a Glasgow employment tribunal, see our opening-day piece and the day three report, with the headcount arithmetic traced at this piece. On how the wider release calendar is bending around November, see the games avoiding GTA 6 piece. The rest of today's reporting is on the news desk, the background record is on the GTA 6 wiki, and the servers list and leaderboards are open.