Back in 2007, Rockstar announced plans to develop a new franchise for the Playstation 3. No details were known of what this project was at the time, but during the E3 2009 Sony press conference it was finally announced as “Agent”, and Sam Houser would let players in on more information of what they’d been working on. As per Sam Houser, Rockstar had long wanted to make a game such as Agent, and the then-Take-Two Interactive president Ben Feder expressed his hope that it would become a flagship franchise on par with the Grand Theft Auto series, which he felt reassured by given Sam and Dan Houser would personally oversee the title’s development. Set during the Cold War in the 1970’s, it was intended to focus on “counter-intelligence, espionage and political assassinations“. Originally planned to release in 2010 as a Playstation-exclusive, it would continue following its announcement to have little updates regarding its status and development, and although Take-Two Interactive’s ownership of the “Agent” trademark would be renewed in both 2013 and 2016, the project was basically confirmed dead in 2018 when United States Patent and Trademark Office declared the “Agent” trademark as having been abandoned. As of 2021, the official Agent website now redirects to Rockstar’s home website. According to former Rockstar North artist Darren Charles Hatton, who leaked screenshots of the game in his portfolio in 2015, and former technical director Obbe Vermeji, the developers involved in Agent were reassigned to work on GTA V in order to help finish its development. 

Outside of a 2025 interview in which Dan Houser says the open world gameplay would have not worked with the movie-like narrative, there was nothing to say or report for many years surrounding Agent. However, a rather exciting discovery was made this past weekend by GTA Forums user XanaBax, who responded to a post on said forums about four character models found in the GTA V source code. XanaBax observed that three of the four characters were for GTA V, but looked further into one that didn’t appear to be connected to the game. After some time spent datamining, XanaBax concluded that this was almost certainly the main character of Agent, citing it being in a folder named “Jimmy” (a codename for the game), the main node in its hierarchy being called “player”, and the character model found in the code appearing in the leaked screenshots from Hatton’s portfolio. Other than later comments noticing it was dated in the files back to 2009, the year Agent was announced, no other updates or discoveries have been made since then. 

For those who have been awaiting any news surrounding the abandoned Rockstar title, this is most certainly exciting. Although no Agent game or any announcements surrounding its future have come out for quite some time, many Rockstar fans have wanted to know more about this project and the circumstances of its cancellation. Perhaps with enough buzz surrounding the topic, Rockstar could give the title a chance? Unfortunately with the studio’s heavy focus on the Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption franchises, it is unlikely they will explore a concept like Agent again, especially considering it would be difficult to make with Rockstar’s open-world format their games tend to follow. For now, all eager fans can do is hope for more news and keep digging for clues.