Rockstar co-founder reveals why the ill-fated PS3 exclusive ‘Agent’ failed to release

Rockstar’s PS3 exclusive ‘Agent’ had long existed in limbo, with nothing seen of the game since its reveal in 2009. Finally after well over a decade, the game was confirmed to have been cancelled. Since then, former team members have started to speak more candidly regarding Agent, with Rockstar Games’ own co-founder Dan Houser now weighing in on the matter.

In an interview with Lex Fridman (and transcribed by VGC), ex-Rockstar head writer and studio co-founder Dan Houser spoke rather candidly on the ill-fated PS3 exclusive Agent, revealing that “We worked a lot on multiple iterations of an open world spy game, and it never came together.”

Offering additional context, Houser continued, “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.”

Despite not being officially cancelled until 2021, Houser claimed that the game never left the early stages of development, stating: “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.”

Considering the lack of pretty much any development details previously regarding the ill-fated Agent, it is highly interesting to hear exactly why the project never came to be.

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KitGuru says: How long did you hold out hope for Agent to be re-revealed? Does Houser’s explanation make sense to you? Would you like to see a modern day Rockstar have a second go at trying to make a spy game? Let us know down below.

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