Former Rockstar Games Co-Founder Revealed Why Studio Cancelled Agent

Over the past few decades, Rockstar Games has canceled quite a few of its projects, including Bully 2, new installments of Manhunt and Midnight Club, as well as some GTA concepts set outside the U.S. But a special place on this list goes to Agent, once a PlayStation 3 exclusive.

Agent had been in active development for several years. The game was supposed to be set in the 1970s, during the Cold War; it was intended to be linear but feature large open-world locations around the globe—all reminiscent of a spy thriller in the vein of the James Bond movies.

Based on some reports, the development of Agent was shut down due to creative differences and a shift in focus to GTA 5 and later to Red Dead Redemption 2. Fortunately, we learned more from Dan Houser, a former co-founder of Rockstar Games. In a recent conversation with IGN, Houser explained that the studio had brought in several different development teams to work on Agent, but they were never able to reach a consensus on what the game should be like. Ultimately, most of the work done on the game was implemented in GTA 5, while the project itself was shelved among other unrealized but promising games with great potential. You can check out Houser’s more detailed comments below:

“We worked a lot on multiple iterations of an open-world spy game, and it never came together. 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 we announced was set during the Cold War in the 1970s was one of the versions.We had so many different versions of this game, we worked with so many different teams.

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. 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 the same interview, Houser also spoke about other Rockstar games —specifically, Red Dead Redemption, Bully, and Max Payne 3. He discussed the difficult development of Bully, the reaction to the original RDR’s ending, and then stated that the studio had failed to bring the Max Payne story to a satisfying conclusion.

As for Rockstar’s upcoming releases, particularly GTA 6, the studio released a trailer this week to mark the game’s launch, which is scheduled for November 19 on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S. The studio has not officially disclosed its future plans, but according to rumors, they are planning to release L.A. Noire 2 in 2030.