While Rockstar Games is known for its massively successful Grand Theft Auto franchise these days, the studio was once also known for trying its hand at a variety of genres. Along with GTA, the studio also made titles like Bully and Rockstar Games Presents Table Tennis in the 2000s, and by the end of the decade, it was trying to work on an open-world game that would have players take on the role of a spy. This project was known as Agent.
According to Rockstar Games co-founder Dan Houser, the company eventually decided to quietly cancel Agent because the vision simply wasn’t coming together. Attempts were made with “two or three different teams”, according to Houser in an interview with IGN, but no one could “get it right”, which led to its eventual cancelation.
“We tried with two or three different teams to make an open-world spy game and could not get it right, so it never came out. We concluded it was not a game we were ever going to figure out how to be able to make. Other people can try, but I personally think it’s hard.” He went on to note that the genre conventions of the typical spy story would often conflict with the studio’s open-world game design philosophies.
While spy dramas often involve characters being stealthy and roaming all over the world to take on highly secretive missions – as was seen earlier this year with IO Interactive’s 007 First Light – Rockstar was known for keeping its games grounded to singular locations that could be thoroughly explored. Along with this, the studio also didn’t have much of a framework for following a spy story at the time.
“I think the momentum of a spy story pushes you forward in time, whereas you want games to be a bit more spread-out. And part of the fun of a spy movie is that you move from location A to very distant location B, and that’s not an experience in an open-world game that really works. So, we tried lots of things, and we didn’t get it quite right, and there were great things that we tried, but it never quite worked.”
Agent was announced all the way back in June 2009 and was being developed for PS3. The title was going to take place in the 1970s, during the Cold War, and would have had players take on the role of a spy that would have to partake in typical missions for the genre that would include espionage, political assassinations, and counter-intelligence. No further details about the project were revealed, and Rockstar would renew its trademark for Agent in 2013 and 2017, prompting plenty of speculation about the project finally coming together and an imminent announcement arriving soon.
However, Rockstar would ultimately abandon the project in 2018, and the company would instead focus its efforts on its two modern franchises – Red Dead Redemption and Grand Theft Auto.
In the meantime, the company is getting ready to release Grand Theft Auto 6 on PS5 and Xbox Series X/S.
