dan houser explains why agent never happened and it makes total sense

Dan Houser finally gave a real answer on Agent, that PlayStation exclusive spy thing Sony announced at E3 2009. Turns out it wasn't some mysterious corporate drama. Rockstar just couldn't make it work.

He told IGN that he's worked on a bunch of games that never came out, so Agent isn't special in that regard. They threw two or three different teams at it over the years, all trying to build an open world spy game, and none of them could get it right. Houser said they concluded it was never going to be a game they'd figure out how to make.

The core problem, according to him, is that great spy movies like Bond work because they bounce all over the world. That kind of globe trotting doesn't translate to an open world. You can build great individual pieces but they don't come together as a full package. He said other people can try but he personally thinks it's hard.

Some images of Agent have leaked out over the years, reportedly set in the 70s. Back in 2009 Take Two's president at the time, Ben Feder, was hyping it as the next GTA. Called it the A team working on an AAA title, said the subject matter, characters, story, environment were all there. That quote aged poorly but it shows how serious they were about it.

Rockstar never gave Agent a release date. It would've been the follow up to GTA 4 in 2008. Instead Rockstar North went straight into GTA 5, which came out in 2013, and now GTA 6 is set for November 19.

Games get canceled all the time, Blizzard says it kills about half of what it starts. Agent just got more attention because it was Rockstar and Sony announced it on a big stage. Honestly I'm fine with it. If they couldn't make the open world spy thing work, better to kill it than ship some half baked mess. Rockstar's whole thing is polish, and Agent sounds like it would've fought that every step of the way.

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Source: GameSpot · Curated content.