Rockstar’s Agent trademark is abandoned

Video game publishers rarely say a project is abandoned or canceled outright — even if their actions have effectively made it so. That makes a trademark abandonment as close as it gets to definitively saying something that was once announced ain’t never gonna happen. And that is officially the case for Agent.

Agent was (in)famously announced as a PlayStation 3 exclusive at E3 2009, one of the last times, if not the last time, Rockstar Games made news at that expo. As noticed by DualShockers, Take-Two Interactive’s trademark is listed as abandoned, as of Nov. 19, 2018, by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

The trademark was originally registered in June 2009; Sony had said in 2007 that Rockstar was working on a PS3 exclusive, which turned out to be Agent, supposed to be an espionage adventure set in the swaggy 1970s.

But it’s easy to see why Agent never went anywhere. Red Dead Redemption, also made by Rockstar’s San Diego studio, launched in 2010 and took up a ton of that studio’s efforts. Then Rockstar didn’t do as well as Take-Two hoped with L.A. Noire and Max Payne, and then Grand Theft Auto 5 blew everything out of the water with its endless presence in Grand Theft Auto Online, which Red Dead Redemption 2 should match with Red Dead Online soon. That leaves little room for the kind of finite experience, much less a console exclusive, that made Rockstar’s name a decade or more ago

The last we saw of Agent was some environmental assets done by an artist who worked on the project in 2010 and 2011. But that’s the thing about the license to kill or be killed; your bosses will deny all knowledge of your existence and actions should either become known.