Cancelled Rockstar espionage flick Agent ended up being filed away without releasing because the studio found a spy narrative impossible to reconcile with their open-world approach to games, according to long-time GTA writer Dan Houser. Despite that, Rockstar subsequently ended up getting halfway up the road of a secret agent-centric GTA 5 DLC before opting to don cowboy hats instead.
If the name Agent isn’t ringing any bells for you, Rockstar announced what would’ve been their take on a Bond-style spy game at E3 2009, attaching a PS3 exclusive tag to it. One would assume it’d likely have hit PC at some point, had it not ended up gradually fizzling out into cancellation instead.
In a lengthy interview with Lex Fridman, Rockstar co-founder Houser revealed that Agent went through “about five different iterations” ranging from a game set during the Cold War tensions of the 1970s to something more “current”. After rotating through all of those ideas, the writer arrived at the idea that the strengths of Hollywood-style spy stories simply aren’t compatible with Rockstar’s open sandboxes.
“I don’t think it works,” Houser said. “I keep thinking about it sometimes, I sometimes lie in bed thinking about it, and I’ve concluded that what makes [spy stories] 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.”
“I don’t know what it would’ve been because we never got it enough to even do a proper story on it,” he then added. 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’s theory is that the “very frenetic” and “beat-to-beat” style of storytelling which sees the likes of James Bond rush all over the world doing missions “against the clock” doesn’t fit with the lulls an open world game will have when it lets a player wander off to do their own thing. Houser reckons being a criminal’s much more ideal for that, since “you fundamentally don’t have anyone telling you what to do”.
The writer touches on this need to marry the ‘on the job’ and ‘off the job’ sides of an open world game earlier in the interview, citing GTA 5’s Trevor and Red Dead Redemption 2 more loosely as occasions when he reckons the studio did well to reconcile the two sides by providing morally grey characters who, to put it bluntly, didn’t feel as jarring to go on a murder spree with. On the other hand, Houser said GTA 4’s Niko ended up possibly having too much going for him on the story side of things, leading players to feel more empathy for him than would be ideal in terms of him being an “effective avatar in the open world”.
To me, the need to serve as a believable hand through which mayhem can be wrought upon the world’s always a secondary thing, though that’s an easier view to hold now GTA Online’s protagonist exists as a go-to silent chaos-causer if I ever feel bothered about going beyond the pail for main story characters. I’d be interested to know whether Rockstar might have looked into trying to balance the spy and agent of chaos sides of any not-quite-Bond in a similar fashion to how Sleeping Dogs handles Wei Shen’s duelling undercover cop/triad criminal roles. That system’s far from perfect roleplaying-wise, but it’d possibly have helped make things fit a bit better. That’s assuming just biting the bullet and making a more linear spy game that differs from the standard open-world fare is off the table.
Strangely, despite Houser saying Agent didn’t work because open-world spying didn’t mesh, the interview also sees him confirm that that a secret agent-themed single-player DLC for GTA 5 was “half-done” by the time it was canned, with the studio moving to work on Red Dead Redemption 2 instead. This add-on was set to see Trevor take on the secret agenting, with Houser saying it was “cute”, but “never quite came together”. While obviously on a smaller scale than a full game and with a character established as an effective psychopath who can get up to just about anything without it seeming too strange, I’m left wondering how it’d not have seen Rockstar have to find a way to reconcile open worlding and spy storying as they struggled to with agent.
Based on the findings of datminers, the spy-ish save the world narrative in GTA Online’s Doomsday Heist seems to have taken on some elements of the canned Trevor DLC. In that case, from what I remember the framing of an agency bringing in a criminal contractor to handle some of their dirty work tends to do the heavy lifting, but the degree of separation being that simple to make does lead you to wonder how a similar wrinkle couldn’t have been worked into Agent.
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