Dan Houser reveals why Rockstar’s canceled spy game Agent never worked despite five revisions
During his recent appearance on the Lex Fridman Podcast number 484, former Rockstar co-founder and writer Dan Houser gave some insight into the studio’s canceled spy game Agent, which never made it to release, despite undergoing five different revisions.
Speaking in the interview, Houser candidly addressed the elephant in the room, saying, “We worked a lot on multiple iterations of an open-world spy game, and it never came together.” While he didn’t say it outright, Houser was referring to Rockstar Games’ Agent.
He further added, “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.”
For the uninformed, Rockstar gave the world a sneak peek into Agent at Sony’s E3 2009 press conference. Agent was supposed to be a PlayStation exclusive title, a Cold War-era thriller set in the 1970s that would throw players into counter-intelligence operations, espionage, assassinations, and exotic locales, pretty much promising a James Bond-style shooter.
However, the 1970s setting was just one of the many prototypes House was referring to, with others exploring more contemporary settings. Houser further revealed:
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.
The game evolved into an internal demo shortly after the release of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas in 2004. Unfortunately, the project stalled. Leaks of Agent, which surfaced from 2009 to 2010, emerged in 2011 and 2015. Without any proper footing or direction, the team was reassigned to Grand Theft Auto V around 2015.
The real problem apparently was how Rockstar Games could have seamlessly meshed the spy genre’s rigid structure with an open-world design philosophy. Houser further mentioned:
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 from being killed, and then save the world.
An open-world game does have moments like that when the story comes together. But for large portions, it’s not a loser, 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.
This put Rockstar in a particular pickle: they wanted to create an open-world experience with the freedom to do much more, something Agent didn’t resonate with, given its hypothetical linear approach.
Houser further explained, “We do 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.”
Rockstar never really announced Agent’s cancellation until the studio removed it from its upcoming titles list in 2021, freeing up headroom for developers to work on Red Dead Redemption 2.
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