Rockstar co-founder Dan Houser has given his perspective on why the studio’s open-world spy game Agent never got off the ground.
For the uninitiated, Agent was first teased way back in 2007 and announced in 2009 as a PS3 exclusive, and although it was reportedly in development at Rockstar North for numerous years, Rockstar and publisher Take Two eventually went quiet on it, abandoning the trademark entirely in 2018. Weirdly, the company never officially, publicly canceled the game, and even today, has never given an explanation or explicit confirmation that it is canceled.
Houser left Rockstar in 2020, and so can’t himself provide that confirmation, but he did explain in an interview with Lex Fridman why it, in his words, didn’t work.
“[Those spy films] are very, very frenetic … you gotta go here and save the world, you gotta go there and stop that person being killed, and then save the world,” said Houser. “And an open world game does have moments like that when the story comes together, but for large portions it’s a lot looser, and you’re just hanging out. And you’re just doing what you want. I want freedom, and I want to go over here and do what I want, and I want to go over and do what you want.
“And that’s why it works while being a criminal [in GTA], because you fundamentally don’t have anyone telling you what to do. And we tried to create this external agency through these people kind of forcing you into the story at times, but as a spy, that doesn’t really work, because you have to be against the clock. So I think for me, I question if you can even make a good open world spy game.”
Honestly, although I would still love to get my hands on a Rockstar-developed spy game, Houser’s reasoning is valid. A lot of the best moments in GTA or Red Dead Redemption are the relaxed minutes and hours in-between action scenes, and it would be hard to deliver on the promise of a thrilling espionage story while staying true to Rockstar’s open world roots.
IOI’s Hitman series, for example, confines the player to large, self contained sandboxes and probably wouldn’t work at all in one interconnected open world map.
Dan Houser says Rockstar Games only attempted GTA London once in 26 years because the series is “so much about America” that “it wouldn’t really have worked in the same way elsewhere”
