2023-11-23 08:38:06
The former CTO of Rockstar Games shared his memories of his work, including Agent, in a blog post, prompting strong reactions from some Rockstar employees.
Obbe Vermeil confirmed he was closing the site because he “didn’t want to anger” his colleagues in Edinburgh. His account covers the years 1995-2009, when he worked at the studio, and it is quite possible that the occasion was the coverage of the problems of Agent.
The developer wrote that intensive work on Agent continued for more than a year, but the team was well aware of the impending difficulties – at some point they had to focus on the next part of Grand Theft Auto.
“We really took it on and worked on it for over a year. I remember when we worked on, for example, the ski chase scene with guns. The game didn’t develop as well as we had hoped. It was inevitable that the entire company would eventually have to deal with another Grand Theft Auto. We tried to shorten the game, trying to get most of it done before the inevitable call came from New York. We cut out an entire level (Cairo, I think) and maybe even the space part.”
Rockstar realized that Agent would be a project that would be “too much of a distraction” for the GTA 5 developers, so production was initially handed over to a smaller team but ultimately not completed.
“It became clear that [Agent] would distract us too much, so we abandoned it. I think the game was given to another Rockstar studio but was never completed.”
At that time, half of the company was working on add-ons for GTA 4 and GTA 5, while the other team was only developing Agent. Rockstar’s take on Grand Theft Auto 5 ended up being a huge success, but it appears the spy game has become “one of GTA 5’s casualties.”
Among the team members, Agent is compared to the adventures of James Bond – the game was codenamed “Jimmy” from the Scottish diminutive of 007.
“The game was supposed to take place in the 1970s and was more linear than Grand Theft Auto, with multiple locations. There was a French Mediterranean city, a Swiss ski resort called Cairo, and at the end there was going to be a big laser shootout in space. Classic James Bond. The atmosphere was very good.”
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