At E3 2009, Sony announced that it was partnering with Rockstar on a PlayStation-exclusive spy game called Agent, with Rockstar founders Sam and Dan Houser overseeing development. The game never materialized, though, and now Dan Houser has shared more details as to why.
Speaking to IGN, Houser said Agent never coming out shouldn’t be a total shock because he worked on “a bunch of games that never came out.” He said Rockstar tried with two or three different teams to make Agent–an open-world spy game–but the teams just “could not get it right.”
“And it never came out. We concluded that it was not a game we were ever going to figure out how to make. Other people can try, but I personally think it’s hard,” he said.
Great spy movies like the James Bond series work so well because they take viewers all over the world, but “that’s not an experience in an open-world game that really works,” Houser said.
“So we tried lots of things and couldn’t get it quite right,” Houser said, going on to say that the teams built great elements but they never came together in a full package.
Images of Agent, which was reportedly set in the ’70s, have emerged over the years, showing off some of what Rockstar was planning.
In 2009, then-Take-Two president Ben Feder told GameSpot that Agent was being positioned to be the next Grand Theft Auto.
“It’s the A team working on an AAA title,” he said at the time. “I think the subject matter, the characters, the story, the environment, the background–all the elements are there. It’s such a rich environment to play in.”
Across the industry, games get canceled regularly–Blizzard has said it cancels 50% of the games it starts–but Rockstar’s Agent got more traction because of the studio’s profile.
Rockstar never gave Agent a release date, but it would have followed up 2008’s Grand Theft Auto 4. The next game that Rockstar North led development on after GTA 4 was 2013’s GTA 5, and now Rockstar North is set to release GTA 6 on November 19.
