Speaking with Lex Fridman, former Rockstar Games bigwig Dan Houser has touched on the demise of Agent, stating the game failed to materialise as he believes that open-world spy games simply don’t work.
Houser made a point of stating that it wasn’t from lack of trying, as Agent went through multiple iterations before it was cancelled for good.
We worked a lot on multiple iterations of an open world spy game [Agent], 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. We need to think through how to do it in a different way as a video game.
Related Content — Upcoming PS5 Games 2025: The Best PS5 Games Coming Soon
I don’t know what it would’ve been because we never got it enough to even do a proper story on it. We were doing the early work where you get the world up and running, and it never really found its feet in either of them. And I sort of think I know why.
Houser went on to explain that open-world settings are not necessarily the best fit for the spy genre, pointing to their context in films, where they are generally very tight and story-driven. The freedom of an open-world approach therefore may not gel well with that kind of experience.
Those films are very, very frenetic, and they’re beat-to-beat. You’ve got to go here and save the world. You’ve got to go there and stop that person being killed, and then save the world. An open-world gave 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 doing what you want. I want freedom, 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 well being a criminal, because you fundamentally don’t have anyone telling you what to do.
Agent was originally announced at E3 2009 for the PS3, although after the initial reveal the game vanished from gaming events and little updates were provided. Unlike The Last Guardian from Sony, which was also revealed at E3 2009 but did eventually see the light of day on PS4 in 2016, Agent never saw the light of day.
Back in 2023, Rockstar Games former technical director, Obbe Vermeij, revealed in a blog post (which they later deleted) that Agent was in development for more than a year before it ran into issues, with Rockstar cutting a number of stages as to shifted resources to the new Grand Theft Auto game.
[Source – Lax Fridman via VGC]