Rockstar GamesIn the 2000s and early 2010s, Rockstar Games actually lived up to its name. Between its crown jewel franchise, Grand Theft Auto, captivating one-offs like Bully and The Warriors, and even its weirder offshoots like Manhunt and Table Tennis, Rockstar was one of gaming’s most interesting developers once upon a time.But among the many Rockstar titles that made it to store shelves, there was one project that never saw the light of day. Agent, first announced during Sony’s 2009 E3 press conference, was poised to be the next big thing from gaming’s coolest development house. But over the next nine years, the game quietly went away. More than 16 years later, we finally know why Rockstar Games abandoned its take on the once-popular spy-action genre.During a nearly three-hour interview with podcaster Lex Fridman, Rockstar Games’ co-founder Dan Houser finally spoke about the troubled development of Rockstar Games’ Agent.“We worked a lot on multiple iterations of an open-world spy game, and it never came together,” Houser said. “It had about five different iterations. I concluded, I don’t think it works.”“I sometimes lie in bed, thinking about it, and I’ve concluded, [...] what makes them really good as film stories, makes them not work as video games,” he continued.A playable spy thriller from Rockstar Games would have been totally on brand for the studio. It made its name doing playable send-ups of popular film genres. Grand Theft Auto was its take on gangster and car films, Red Dead was a send-up of classic spaghetti westerns, Bully of John Hughes' coming-of-age flicks, and so on. I would have loved seeing its version of classic films like Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest and the James Bond books and films.Unfortunately, Houser says the studio’s signature open-world format simply wasn’t compatible with the genre.“Those films are very, very frenetic, and they go from beat to beat to beat,” Houser explained. “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. And an open-world game does have moments like that when the story comes together... But for large portions, it’s a lot looser. You’re just hanging out and doing what you want.”Being a criminal or outlaw, like in GTA or Red Dead Redemption, works cohesively with the freedom of an open world, according to Houser.“As a spy, it doesn’t really work because you have to be against the clock,” he said. “For me, I question if you can even make a good open-world spy game.”In addition to its spy game, Houser says Rockstar considered a game that featured knights and mythology as well, though that concept never made it as far as Agent did.“I just did some backstory, played around with a few ideas,” Houser said. “But it was always something I thought I would never do, and then kind of fell in love with it a little bit.”Rockstar’s infatuation with the spy genre didn’t stop with the cancellation of Agent. Houser briefly spoke about the canceled Grand Theft Auto 5 single-player DLC, which would have turned Los Santos’ own agent of chaos, Trevor Phillips, into an undercover spy for the federal government. Houser said that Rockstar completed about half of the expansion before cancelling the project outright.“It was cute, but it never quite came together,” he said. “But if that had come out, we probably wouldn’t have got to make Red Dead 2. So there’s always compromises.”Trevor almost had his own Agent-themed single-player spinoff, but the project was cancelled to ensure Red Dead Redemption 2 made it across the finish line. | Rockstar GamesWhile I understand Houser’s reservations about adapting the freedom of an open-world game to the spy thriller genre, I also regret that the company was so insistent on keeping the game open-ended. I look at games like Obsidian’s Alpha Protocol and Cyberpunk 2077’s Phantom Liberty and see examples of games that pulled off some of what Agent could have been. I would have been fine relinquishing some of the aimlessness of Rockstar’s biggest games in favor of a focused and stylish spy game, fueled by the studio’s signature reverence for classic genre films and books. While we don’t get a lot of linear games from Rockstar (or any games at all for that matter), the few that we have seen, like Max Payne 3 and The Warriors, are the best in their respective genres.In an era where this once-flourishing genre is sorely underrepresented, I’m crushed that Rockstar Games abandoned its chance have breathe life into the spy genre with a new franchise. Perhaps someone will take up Houser’s challenge of trying to make the concept work in one way or another. Maybe IO Interactive’s upcoming James Bond game, 007 First Light, will make good on this missed opportunity.