Way back in 2009, Rockstar and PlayStation announced a new exclusive called Agent. The spy game was heavily influenced by James Bond and would’ve had players take on the role of Jimmy in a 1970s Cold War setting. It was eventually canceled and never saw the light of day but a former developer has revealed new details about the game and another zombie title that was also canceled.
According to former Technical Director Obbe Vermeij, who spent 14 years with Rockstar North before leaving in 2009, the plan for Agent was to split Rockstar North into two teams. One team would be working on Grand Theft Auto IV while the other team was working on Agent, which was codenamed Jimmy.
“It was a James Bond game and Jimmy is the Scottish version of James,” Vermeij said. “The game was to be set in the 70s, be more linear than GTA with a number of locations. There was a French Mediterranean city, A Swiss ski resort, Cairo and at the end there would be a big shootout with lasers in space.” Vermeij worked on Agent for “over a year” contributing to sequences like a downhill chase scene with guns.”
But as Vermeij explains, the team knew that all focus would shift to GTA.
“The game wasn’t progressing as well as we’d hoped. It was inevitable that eventually, the whole company would have to get behind GTA 4. We tried to cut the game down in an attempt the get the bulk of it done before the inevitable call from [Rockstar New York] would come. We cut out an entire level (I think Cairo) and maybe even the space section. It became clear that Jimmy was going to be too much of a distraction for us and we ditched it. I think it was handed over to another company within R* but never got completed.”
Rockstar abandoned the Agent trademark in 2018 and took the game’s website offline in 2021.
Agent wasn’t the only different game that Rockstar had in mind. Vermeij also talked about a canceled zombie game that Rockstar was developing. “After Vice City [in 2002] there was a sense within North that it would be nice to do something else, Vermeij noted. “Something that wasn’t GTA. Some of the artists wanted to do a zombie survival game. Programmers like fantasy. Artists like zombies. Not sure why that is.” The game went under the working title “Z.“
“The idea was to use the Vice code as is,” Vermeij explained. “The game was to take place on a windswept foggy Scottish island. The player would be under constant attack from zombies. The player would need to use vehicles to get around but vehicles would need fuel. Acquiring the fuel would be a big part of the game.”
Z was in development for “maybe a month or so. Vermeiji said the game was canceled, in large part to the nature of the genre and how dark it can be. “The idea seemed depressing and quickly ran out of steam. Even the people who originally coined the idea lost faith. We dropped the idea and got on with San Andreas.”
Following Vermeij’s posts, he has since provided an update saying that he will no longe be updating his blog due his former employer. “”Apparently some of the OG’s there are upset by my blog,” Vermeij wrote. “I genuinely didn’t think anyone would mind me talking about 20 year old games but I was wrong. Something about ruining the Rockstar mystique or something. Anyway, this blog isn’t important enough to me to piss off my former colleagues in Edinburgh so I’m winding it down. I’ll maybe just leave a few articles with anecdotes that don’t affect anyone but me. I would love for Rockstar to open up about development of the trilogy themselves, but it doesn’t look like that’s going to happen anytime soon. Maybe I’ll try again in a decade or two.”
Despite Agent and Z not seeing the light of day, Rockstar Games is ready to reveal to the world what they have next. Earlier this month, they announced that the first official look and trailer for the next Grand Theft Auto would premiere in early December. Rockstar also updated its website and seemingly made changes to its Social Club platform in anticipation of the reveal of the next Grand Theft Auto.