Dan Houser Explains Why Rockstar Canceled the Spy Action “Agent” — and the Advantage of a Criminal Protagonist

02.11.2025 Comment Views: 21

Multiple iterations of Agent never came together as an open-world title.

The espionage action game Agent, announced by Rockstar Games many years ago, ultimately never reached release. For years, fans speculated about what went wrong; recently Dan Houser offered an explanation.

The Rockstar veteran spoke with Lex Fridman, and the pair discussed Agent during the podcast.

Houser said Agent went through roughly five iterations and explored numerous settings, from the Cold War (the 1970s) to contemporary timelines. The team never managed to finalize a cohesive narrative. They tried multiple approaches to make the world function, but fitting a spy story into an open-world framework proved problematic.

In Houser’s view, those kinds of stories are better suited to film. Open worlds work well with a criminal protagonist, not with a spy racing against the clock:

I think I know why we couldn’t get Agent to work. There are spy films that are relentlessly urgent—the story propels you from one high-stakes scene to the next. You have to go there and stop an assassination, then save the world. Open-world games can have moments where the narrative lines up, but mostly they give you freedom to wander and choose your own activities: “I want freedom. I want to go there and do what I want.” That’s why the open-world model fits a criminal protagonist so well: essentially, no one is telling you what to do.

We tried to create agency through characters who would pull you into the story. But that approach doesn’t work for a spy lead, because a spy has to operate against the clock. So I doubt it’s possible to make a genuinely good open-world spy game.

Source: iXBT.games

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