The long-missing PlayStation exclusive spy thriller Agent has never been officially cancelled. However, a developer from Rockstar has revealed that the James Bond-esque game was shut down for distracting devs from the Grand Theft Auto series.
Alongside revealing that Grand Theft Auto: Vice City was supposed to be a zombie game, Rockstar’s ex-technical director Obbe Vermeij revealed why Agent was cancelled after its E3 2009 reveal.
Vermeij revealed that Agent was cancelled for distracting the team from the development of GTA IV. While the game was completely different from the GTA series — it was even linear compared to open world — it was deemed too much of an interference.
“The game wasn’t progressing as well as we’d hoped,” Vermeij told RockPaperShotgun. “It was inevitable that eventually the whole company would have to get behind GTA4. We tried to cut the game down in an attempt the get the bulk of it done before the inevitable call from [Rockstar New York] would come.”
The developer revealed multiple parts of Agent that were worked on. One mission would see the player go to space in a very 70s-style Bond move, although that section was eventually cut.
“The game was to be set in the 70s, but more linear than GTA with a number of locations,” he said. “There was a French Mediterranean city, A Swiss ski resort, Cairo and at the end there would be a big shootout with lasers in space.”
After Rockstar decided to quit on Agent, the game was allegedly sent to another developer while the studio worked on its open-world projects. As we now know, the game would never be completed.
“It became clear that Jimmy [Agent] was going to be too much of a distraction for us and we ditched it. I think it was handed over to another company within R* but never got completed,” he explained.
Rockstar Games used to create a multitude of projects, such as the licensed title The Warriors and brilliant RAGE engine tech demo Rockstar’s Table Tennis. Unfortunately, the studio is now limited to just open world games, titles that take years to develop with hundreds of developers.
The next game to release from Rockstar is the just officially-announced GTA VI. A trailer for the open world game will launch this December.