More information about Agent has emerged
A former Rockstar developer has revealed information about some of the studio’s cancelled projects. Agent, a secret-agent-themed action game that was once slated to be a PS3 exclusive, and an untitled zombie survival game set on a Scottish isle are among them.
The information comes from former Rockstar North technical director Obbe Vermeji, who has recently begun to update a blog (via Rock Paper Shotgun) about his experiences there. Vermeji joined the studio in 1995 as DMA Design and left in 2009, shortly after GTA IV was released.
Agent was announced in 2007 as a PlayStation platform-exclusive IP. More information was released in 2009, but the game quietly vanished. It may have died when the trademark expired in 2018. The game appeared to be level-based, with locations including a Swiss ski resort, Cairo, a French Mediterranean city, and even a final space station level. So, Moonraker rather than Casino Royale. Vermeji worked on the game for “over a year” before Rockstar decided to focus on GTA IV.
“The game wasn’t progressing as well as we’d hoped,” Verjmeji wrote. It was unavoidable that the entire company would have to rally behind GTA IV. We attempted to shorten the game in order to complete the majority of it before the inevitable call from [Rockstar New York]. We removed an entire level (I believe Cairo) and possibly even the space section.” Unfortunately, the studio was unable to complete it on time. According to Verjmeji, the game was passed off to another internal studio, Verjmeji said. Unfortunately, the studio was unable to complete it on time. According to Verjmeji, the game was passed off to another internal studio.
The zombie game came after Vice City and was intended to expand on its code base. Vermeji stated, “[a]fter Vice City [in 2002] there was a sense within North that it would be nice to do something else. 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.”
It was an open-world game set on a windswept and foggy island where players had to fight off constant zombie attacks while also refueling various vehicles to get around. However, according to Vermeji, development lasted only a month.”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.”
Vermeji has taken down his blog since publishing these details. Vermeji claims he received a terse email from Rockstar North. He came to the conclusion, “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 the 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.”