Dan Houser Finally Explains Why Rockstar Killed Agent
Rockstar's PlayStation-exclusive spy game vanished after years of silence. Dan Houser has now told IGN exactly why it was never finished.
Somewhere in a Rockstar archive there is a hard drive full of a game that millions of people spent a decade and a half wondering about, and Dan Houser has finally told the room why it is staying there. Speaking to IGN, in comments reported by GameSpot, the Rockstar co-founder confirmed that Agent, the PlayStation-exclusive spy thriller Sony announced with great ceremony at E3 2009, was not shelved, delayed, or quietly folded into something else. It was tried, repeatedly, and it failed.
Houser was characteristically unsentimental about it, noting that he has worked on plenty of games that never came out and that Agent simply joins the pile. What makes the admission worth sitting with is the detail: Rockstar did not give up on Agent after one disappointing prototype. According to Houser, two or three separate teams took a run at the open-world spy concept, and none of them could get it right. "We concluded that it was not a game we were ever going to figure out how to make," he told IGN. That is not the language of a publisher reshuffling priorities. That is the language of a studio admitting a genre beat it.
Why James Bond Doesn't Open World
Houser's explanation for the failure is the most interesting part of the story, because it cuts against everything Rockstar is famous for. Great spy fiction, he argued, works because it moves: a different city, a different set piece, a different tone, every twenty minutes, the way a Bond film hops from a casino to a ski chase to a volcano lair. An open world, by contrast, wants you to stay, to learn its streets, to treat one place as a character in its own right. Houser's teams reportedly built strong individual pieces of Agent and never found a structure that let a globe-trotting spy story and a persistent open world occupy the same game.
It is a tidy explanation, and also a slightly damning one for anyone still holding out hope that a rebooted take could crack it, since Houser's own verdict was that other people are welcome to try but he personally thinks it is hard. That is as close to a public epitaph as a canceled game gets.
The Game That Was Supposed to Follow GTA 4
In 2009, Agent was not pitched as a curiosity. Then-Take-Two president Ben Feder told GameSpot at the time that it had Rockstar's A team, that the subject matter and characters and world were all there, and that it was being positioned as the studio's next major release after Grand Theft Auto IV. Set reportedly in the 1970s, with leaked imagery surfacing over the years to tease what might have been, Agent carried exactly the kind of profile that made its disappearance conspicuous rather than routine.
The job of following GTA 4 fell instead to Rockstar North and Grand Theft Auto V, and the studio is now weeks from Grand Theft Auto VI arriving on November 19. Agent, for its part, gets to remain the one entry in Rockstar's catalog that never had to survive contact with a review score, which is one way, I suppose, of never having to be compared to anything the studio actually finished.