A former Rockstar Games developer has revealed details regarding the studio’s unreleased stealth action game, Agent, and why it was canceled.
Obbe Vermeij, former Rockstar Games technical director, shared a blog post (update: the post has since been deleted) in which he revealed details regarding Agent and why it ultimately got canceled. He mentioned that, after finishing work on San Andreas, the development team really wanted to work on something besides the GTA. Rockstar San Diego had been working on a James Bond style game at the time. Leslie Benzies, former Rockstar Games president, was keen on doing something along those lines.
The studio put together a demo featuring espionage based gameplay in San Andreas. Ha mentioned that there was a hang glider and a something along the lines of a car turning into a submarine. The demo impressed the higher ups at the studio, which led to the development team starting work on it. The idea was that the team at Rockstar North would roughly be split down the middle, and around half of the team would work on the GTA IV and the other half on Agent.
Vermeij stated that the project was internally known as Jimmy, since it was a James Bond-esque game and Jimmy is the Scottish version of James. The game was to be set in the 70s and feature a number of locations, while being more linear than the GTA series. There was a French Mediterranean city, a Swiss ski resort, Cairo and at the end there would be a big shootout using lasers in space. He described it as “classic James Bond” with a “very cool” vibe.
According to Vermeij, the designated team at Rockstar North worked on Agent for over a year. He recalled working on a downhill skiing chase scene with guns. However, the game wasn’t progressing as well as the development team had hoped. He said that the entire team at Rockstar North was inevitably called upon to work on GTA IV. As a result, Vermeij and his team tried to cut Agent down in an attempt the get the bulk of it done before the inevitable call to work on GTA IV would come. He mentioned that they had to cut out a large chunk of the game, including the entire Cairo level and possibly the space section, as he recalled.
Ultimately, it became clear that Agent was going to be too much of a distraction for Vermeij’s team. As a result, it let go of the project and joined the other half of Rockstar North to work on GTA IV. Meanwhile, Agent was handed over to another company within R*, but was never completed.
