Remember Agent? After first mentioning it in 2007, Rockstar formally announced it in 2009—an espionage game in an open world, GTA meets James Bond, with all the cars-turning-into-submarines gadgetry that implies. After bouncing between different Rockstar studios for a while, Agent vanished off the radar, with its death finally being confirmed in 2021.
In a rare interview, Rockstar co-founder Dan Houser appeared on the Lex Fridman podcast recently to discuss all things GTA and Red Dead Redemption, though Agent also came up. "It had about five different iterations," Houser explained. "I don't think it works, I concluded. I keep thinking about it sometimes, 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 videogames—or I need to think through how to do it a different way as a videogame."
