Rockstar’s open world espionage game, Agent, never came to pass — and now we have a little bit more clarity on why.
Dan Houser, co-founder of Rockstar Games who has since left the company, shared his thoughts on the cancelled project during an interview with Lex Fridman.
Houser brings up Agent as part of a broader conversation about open world design: “We worked a lot on multiple iterations of an open world spy game, and it never came together,” he says.
“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.”
His main point is that, in his view, open world game design doesn’t mesh well with the secret agent fantasy.
In a spy thriller movie, there’s an urgency to the plot that drives things forward at pace, but that can’t really work in an open world setting, Houser argues.
“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 that’s why it works well being a criminal, because you fundamentally don’t have anyone telling you what to do.
We try and create 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.”
Agent was announced as a PS3 exclusive back in 2009, but after years of no-shows, the game was ultimately shelved.
Obbe Vermeij, ex-technical director at Rockstar North, shared his view on Agent a couple of years ago, telling a slightly different story about its fate. According to him, despite working on the game for over a year, it was dropped in favour of the next GTA.
If it really wasn’t coming together as Houser says, it seems that may have been for the best. Even so, we’re still curious to see Rockstar’s take on different genres, and at the time, an open world action adventure about spies was an incredibly promising sell.
Would you have liked to play Agent? Do you think a spy game can work as an open world? Discuss in the comments section below.
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