Rockstar denies knowledge of its Agent’s whereabouts, activities

Rockstar Games’ Agent is one of those vaporware wraiths anyone with two brain cells knows is never gonna be released. But because AAA publishers can never give a straight answer when they cancel a project, fans return the courtesy with needling mentions of their undead creations’ theoretical existence.

Looks like Rockstar had enough of that. Agent was quietly removed from the publisher’s official website, where it had been — if only in name — since it was announced at Sony’s E3 2009 news conference. Once again, we remind you that the license to kill is also a license to be killed.

We contacted a Rockstar Games representative and were officially told no comment! That’s OK, the fact the company abandoned the Agent trademark in 2018 still does all of the talking.

If Agent is no longer on Rockstar’s list of everything-we’ve-done-and-are-doing, what are fans missing out on? Agent always sounded like something that now seems incompatible with the kind of long-tail, blockbuster games catalog parent company Take-Two Interactive expects from Rockstar. Agent was to have been a classic console exclusive, for PlayStation 3, apparently as a sophisticated single-player narrative with a swanky ’70s vibe.

Bethesda Softworks and Arkane Studios may have made that work just last month with Deathloop, but such things are no longer Strauss Zelnick’s cup of tea. Not in the age of Grand Theft Auto Online, Red Dead Online, and NBA 2K22’s MyPlayer.

So anyway, Agent’s still not confirmed, still not denied, and its government still denies all knowledge of its whereabouts or activities. But for sure we’ll continue to update this story whenever there’s a mention of Agent somewhere, like on a wall of stars in Langley, next to Half-Life 3 and Beyond Good and Evil 2.