Rockstar’s Agent Was Shelved After Five Reworks, Open-World Spy Fantasy Never Clicked, Says Houser

As Rockstar Games plugs away on Grand Theft Auto 6, one mystery remains for the decorated company: Agent, a PlayStation 3-exclusive that never really received a proper reveal. Its trademark would see several renewals before its eventual abandonment in 2018.

But that doesn’t mean Rockstar wasn’t working on it. Speaking to Lex Fridman in a recent interview, former co-founder Dan Houser says the team had “about five different iterations” of the spy thriller. He eventually concluded, “I don’t think it works.”

“We worked a lot on multiple iterations of an open-world spy game, and it never came together. Agent had about five different iterations. I don’t think it works, I concluded. I keep thinking about it sometimes, I lie in bed thinking about it, and I’ve concluded: What makes them really good as film stories makes them not work as video games, or I need to think through how to do it a different way as a video game.”

Though announced as set in the 70s during the Cold War, that was only one version. “There was another that was set in current [times]…we had so many different versions of this game. We worked on it with so many different teams,” said Houser. “I question if you can make a good, open-world spy game,” he added, which is interesting because it was never announced as an open-world title.

Of course, it’s impossible to know now whether it would have been a Grand Theft Auto-style open world or something closer to 007 First Light, IO Interactive’s own spy fantasy based on the James Bond franchise. Eventually, the team may have decided to just focus on more important projects, such as when it abandoned Bully 2.