author: GRG
Rockstar Removes Last Traces of Its Unfinished Project
More than twelve years after its official announcement, Rockstar is obliterating the last traces of the Agent project. The title disappeared from the list of games on the company's website and we probably won't hear about it again.
Until recently Agent was listed as one of the games in Rockstar Games portfolio, with the note "coming soon". This led some people to believe that the title had not been abandoned. It seems, however, that there was an end to the twelve-year saga of Agent. The game was removed from the company's website.
- Agent was announced back in 2009 and was to be a new brand from Rockstar Games, alongside the likes of Grand Theft Auto;
- Work on the title dragged on for years, with individual artowrks leaking out from time to time. In 2018, Take-Two Interactive's rights to the Agent brand expired;
- This year, Rockstar Games removed the title from its portfolio of games. It was the last trace of a game announced twelve years ago that never lived to see release.
First information about works on a new game appeared during E3 in 2007, when Sony announced that the next brand after Grand Theft Auto would be a PlayStation 3 exclusive, but it wasn't until 2009 that the title and more details were revealed.
Agent was supposed to be a big production, a stealth game set during the Cold War and a title available exclusively on the PlayStation 3 console, which would aim to redefine the action game genre. At the time, Rockstar had made a name for itself with titles such as Grand Theft Auto IV, Bully, Midnight Club: Los Angeles and Manhunt 2, so the announcement of the new IP met with great interest and enthusiasm. The head of Take-Two Interactive at the time spoke with delight about Agent in 2009:
"It's going to push the edge, it's going to be genre-defining and it's going to be a whole new way of experiencing videogames that we haven't really seen before."
The title was the brainchild of the Houser brothers, co-founders of Rockstar Games, and was to replicate the success of Grand Theft Auto. The siblings wanted to personally oversee the game's development. In the same year, it was announced that the game would be released in 2010 at the earliest. Over the following years, only a few images from an early version appeared online. In 2013 Take-Two Interactive renewed the rights to the name, and two years later one of the former employees of Rockstar North published some new screenshots from the game and revealed that some of the team working on the game had been reassigned to work on Grand Theft Auto V. He also expressed concerns that Agent may never be completed.
A concept art from 2017. Source: vg247.com
In 2016, the rights to the brand were renewed again and a year later more concept arts and sketches were leaked, which you can see here. The developers did not comment on the situation in any way, and some players were still hoping for the game to appear on PlayStation 4.
The United States Patent and Trademark Office announced in 2018 that the rights to the name had not been renewed once again. Thus Agent as a brand officially ceased to exist. Since then, the only light in the tunnel was the game's presence on Rockstar Games' website. Finally, twelve years after the official announcement, the last traces of Agent disappeared.
