GTA Co-Creator Explains Why Rockstar Canceled Spy Action Game Agent

There were ideas, but they could not pull the game together.

Not all Rockstar Games ideas ever made it to release. For example, Agent, a project announced in 2009 during a Sony event, was never released. This spy action game for the PlayStation 3 was supposed to plunge players into the dark atmosphere of the Cold War.

Players occasionally remember Agent, and Rockstar Games co-founder Dan Houser recently spoke about the project. During an interview with IGN, he shared that multiple teams tried to implement the open-world spy game concept across several attempts:

We tried with two or three different teams to make an open-world spy game, but we were never able to find the right approach, and it didn’t make it to release. In the end, we came to the conclusion that we couldn’t make a game like that.

GTA and RDR creator explains why Rockstar canceled the spy action game Agent — Image source: Sayak96

Dan Houser explained that the momentum of a spy story pushes forward through time, whereas video game action needs to unfold more evenly:

Other people can try [making a game like that], but personally I think it is difficult because the momentum of a spy story constantly pushes you forward through time, whereas in games you want events to be distributed more evenly. And, you know, one of the charms of a spy movie is moving from point A to a very distant point B. And that doesn’t work in an open-world game.

Certain concepts for Agent were interesting, but they did not come together into a full game:

We tried a lot of options, but we were never able to implement it properly. And in every one of those versions we tried to create, there were wonderful pieces, but overall nothing came together.

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