Rockstar Games co-founder Dan Houser says Agent was canceled

Rockstar Games co-founder Dan Houser says the studio canceled its open-world spy game, Agent, because the project's vision was not coming together. Houser says two or three different teams attempted to develop the game, but no one could get it right.

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The project, which was announced in June 2009 for the PS3, was set in the 1970s during the Cold War. Houser says the genre conventions of spy stories often conflicted with Rockstar's open-world design philosophies. He says spy dramas typically move a character quickly from one distant location to another, which he believes does not work well for an open-world experience. Rockstar eventually abandoned the project in 2018 to focus on the Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption franchises.