Long before GTA 6 became Rockstar Games’ main attraction, the studio was working on something completely different: a globe-trotting Cold War spy game called Agent.
Agent was officially announced as a PlayStation 3 exclusive at E3 2009, although work on different versions of the project stretched back even further. Rockstar described the game as an action title centred around counterintelligence, espionage and political assassinations during the height of the Cold War in the late 1970s.
Rockstar co-founder Sam Houser said at the time that Agent was a game the company had wanted to make for years, promising a combination of action, atmosphere and storytelling in a unique period setting.
Behind the scenes, however, Rockstar’s ambitions for Agent appear to have been much bigger than its brief public reveal suggested.
Former Rockstar North technical director Obbe Vermeij later revealed that the project was internally known as “Jimmy,” a reference to James Bond. Rockstar North reportedly envisioned a spy adventure that would take players across several locations rather than keeping them inside a single GTA-style city.
Plans reportedly included a French Mediterranean city and a Swiss ski resort, while Vermeij recalled work being done on sequences such as a downhill skiing chase involving guns. Other ideas were even more extravagant, including a potential finale involving a shootout in space.
One version of Agent also included Cairo, Egypt, and Rockstar’s attempts to recreate the city resulted in one of the strangest development stories in the company’s history.
During the early 2000s, a small team from Rockstar San Diego travelled to Cairo to gather reference material after struggling to find suitable imagery for the game. The developers spent their time photographing streets, buildings and neighbourhoods, reportedly capturing around 12,000 photographs.
Their activities eventually attracted the attention of Egyptian authorities.
Members of the team were repeatedly questioned, one developer reportedly had a gun pushed into his ribs during an encounter, and their driver was questioned by authorities. The developers were eventually told they could no longer leave their hotel rooms.
Things became even more serious when one team member attempting to leave the country was detained at the airport. Authorities reportedly suspected the group of filming pornography and demanded access to their photographs and equipment.
Rockstar San Diego project leader Luis Gigliotti contacted the US Embassy in Cairo for assistance as concerns grew that members of the team could potentially face serious legal trouble.
Fortunately, the developers were eventually able to leave Egypt and return to the United States.
Despite the extraordinary amount of work going into Agent, the game would never reach players.
Rockstar San Diego’s team was eventually shifted towards development of Red Dead Redemption, while Rockstar North later took control of Agent. According to Vermeij, Rockstar North initially planned to divide its developers between Grand Theft Auto IV and Agent.
However, maintaining another major project alongside GTA became increasingly difficult. Agent’s scope was reportedly reduced, with locations and sequences being cut, but the project was ultimately considered too much of a distraction from Grand Theft Auto.
Agent nevertheless received its official PS3 announcement in 2009, leaving fans waiting for a game that would never arrive. Years of silence followed, and Take-Two eventually abandoned the Agent trademark in 2018.
Agent remains one of the biggest unanswered “what ifs” in Rockstar’s history. Instead of another modern American crime story, Rockstar was attempting a 1970s international espionage adventure filled with secret agents, exotic locations and cinematic action.
Considering what Rockstar would later accomplish with Grand Theft Auto V and Red Dead Redemption 2, Agent offers a fascinating glimpse at a very different direction the studio could have taken.