Over 12 years after its E3 2009 announcement, Agent appears to have officially been canceled, evidenced in the project's removal from the official Rockstar Games website. Jack Tretton, who then served as Sony Computer Entertainment America's President and CEO, unveiled Agent as a PS3 exclusive during PlayStation's E3 2009 conference.
Rockstar North, the group behind Grand Theft Auto IV and V, led the charge on the title's development. At the time, Agent sounded promising, its premise centered on a Cold War-set espionage tale in the 1970s. Apart from its iconic black and white logo, however, nothing concrete related to the game ever surfaced in any official fashion. Fans and pundits kept hope alive for several years, though, particularly whenever Rockstar parent company Take-Two Interactive renewed the IP's trademark in 2013 and 2017. The publisher's abandonment of the Agent trademark in November 2018 implied the adventure would never see the light of day. Now there's yet another reason to believe that Agent will remain little more than vaporware.
Earlier today, October 5, Twitter user Ulvi noted that Agent has disappeared from the Games section on the Rockstar Games website. Interestingly, snapshots via the Wayback Machine show the Agent page on Rockstar's site existed as of September 21, 2021. When exactly the studio expunged mentions of the espionage title from its pages currently remains a mystery. Either way, this new development suggests Agent is officially dead and gone.
The game's apparent cancelation shouldn't come as much of a surprise. Rockstar Games, Take-Two, and Sony haven't acknowledged Agent in an incredibly long time. All three companies have moved on, with Sony managing to broker other, much smaller deals with Rockstar Games and Take-Two in the 12-plus years since that particular announcement. It would seem this counts as one experience that simply wasn't meant to come to fruition.
Agent isn't the only PlayStation exclusive title from a third-party entity to vanish into vaporware, either. During PS4's February 2013 reveal event, Sony showcased Capcom's Deep Down - a cooperative dungeon crawler once helmed by Street Fighter figurehead Yoshinori Ono. In 2019, Ono told press that Capcom placed the project on an indefinite hold. It's unlikely to resurface, however. Even PlayStation's former boss, Shawn Layden, remains in the dark about what happened with Deep Down. The true story behind Agent may remain similarly shrouded in mystery for a long time to come.
Agent was once in development for PlayStation 3.
Source: Rockstar Games via Ulvi/Twitter
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October 06, 2021 at 12:47AM
