Rockstar is a game developer that has been put on the map for its blockbuster IPs, such as the Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Revolver franchise. The company could be regarded as having the power of the Midas touch for figuratively turning gold out of anything it touches. However, not every project handled by the studio gets to see the light of the day. One such project is “Agent,” which was a Rockstar project that was announced back in 2009 as an exclusive PlayStation 3 title. But what happened to it?
Revealed via a blog by the former Rockstar Games technical director, Obbe Vermeij provided some info on what happened during Agent’s development and what happened to it since.
Agent was supposed to be Rockstar North’s take at a spy thriller game, inspired by the popular franchise James Bond. The muse is so apparent that the studio has even given the project the moniker “Jimmy,” which is a nickname for James in Scotland where the studio is based. A James Bond-like game being made by a studio with a prowess that produced some of the best open-world games, what could go wrong, right?
Please step aside
Well, Grand Theft Auto was.
By the time Agent is already over a year in development, Rockstar has already laid out plans for other major projects. Which, at the time, was the DLC for GTA IV, The Lost and Damned, and its successor, GTA V. Although these major projects did not outright gather all the attention of the developers, they nevertheless took half of the workforce that used to work on Agent.
Efforts were made to expedite the Agent’s progress, such as cutting content. But with sluggish progression, the project has become an unwanted distraction. It even got passed to a different company within Rockstar for probable completion. Unfortunately, even that move did not bear fruit, leaving the game somewhat dead, though not officially.
To this day, there is no telling what fate awaits Agent as there have been no indications it’s even being worked on at the present. This is not helped by the fact that any previous hints about Agent’s continued life support were removed in the past several years, such as the scrapping of renewed trademarks in 2018 and the shutdown of its website in 2021.
