Rockstar co-founder Dan Houser has offered the best explanation yet for why the developer's open-world spy thriller Agent fell by the wayside.
Agent is the Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption developer's long lost spy game, which was announced as a PlayStation 3 exclusive in 2009 but has since disappeared. Rockstar has never officially canceled the project, but images leaked in 2015 showed some of its levels, and while some hope remained due to renewed trademarks, this was eventually scrapped in 2018 and its website was shut down in 2021.
So, what happened to Agent? Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption writer Dan Houser, now of Absurd Ventures, has finally offered fans a detailed explanation in an interview on the Lex Fridman podcast. According to Houser, despite multiple versions of Agent being attempted at Rockstar, the game never came together, and that’s because, fundamentally, an open-world spy game simply doesn’t work.
“We worked a lot on multiple iterations of an open-world spy game, and it never came together,” Houser began.
“It had about five different iterations. I don’t think it works. I concluded — and I keep thinking about it sometimes, I sometimes lie in bed thinking about it — and I’ve concluded that what makes them really good as film stories makes them not work as video games. Or we need to think through how to do it in a different way as a video game”.
The version of Agent Rockstar announced was set in during the Cold War in the 1970s, but Houser revealed this was just one version of many Rockstar tried and failed to turn into a fun video game. Indeed, there was a version set in the modern day that also failed to go anywhere.
“That was one of the versions,” he said. “There was another one that was set in the current… we had so many different versions of this game, we worked with so many different teams.”
He continued: “Espionage, assassinations… I don't know what it would've been because it never really… We never got it enough to even doing a proper story on it. We were doing the early work as you get the world up and running. It never really found its feet in either of them. And I sort of think I know why.
“Because in one of those films, they're very, very frenetic and they beat to beat to beat — you gotta go here and save the world, you gotta go there and stop that person being killed and then save the world. An open-world game does have moments like that when the story comes together. But for large portions, it's a lot looser, and you're just hanging out and you’re just doing what you want. And I want freedom. I wanna go over here and do what I want, and I wanna go over and do what you want. That's why it works well being a criminal, because you fundamentally don't have anyone telling you what to do. We try and create external agency through these people kind of forcing you into the story at times.
“But as a spy, that doesn't really work because you have to be against the clock. So I think for me, I question if you can even make a good open-world spy game. So lots of things would work as open-world games, but I don't know if a spy does.”
In 2023, former Rockstar Games technical director Obbe Vermeij said pressure from Grand Theft Auto 5's development contributed to Agent eventually switching studios before being scrapped altogether.
"We really got going on this one and worked on it for over a year. I remember working on a downhill skiing chase scene with guns for instance," Vermeij said of Agent.
"The game wasn't progressing as well as we'd hoped. It was inevitable that eventually the whole company would have to get behind the next Grand Theft Auto. We tried to cut the game down in an attempt to get the bulk of it done before the inevitable call from New York would come. We cut out an entire level (I think Cairo) and maybe even the space section.
"It became clear that [Agent] was going to be too much of a distraction for us and we ditched it. I think it was handed over to another company within Rockstar but never got completed." Half of the Rockstar North team was working on Grand Theft Auto 4 DLC and Grand Theft Auto 5, while half was set to work on Agent before the importance of its premiere franchise took over.
