Rockstar Games asked for the Agent article to be removed, but the ex-developer denies rumors of legal threats

Obbe Vermeij, the technical director who worked for 14 years at Rockstar North, has had to delete his entry about the company’s canceled titles. He did so after the Take-Two Interactive company requested the removal of the content since the former employee had revealed details about Agent, a title that ceased development years ago.

“Today (22 Nov 2023) I got an email from [Rockstar North],” Vermeij explained in his blog. “Apparently some of the OG’s there are upset by my blog. 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.” And continues: “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.” On Twitter/X, the developer denied some statements made by Kotaku about him being threatened legally by the company: “There was no contact with R* New York. No legal threat. No silencing.”

What was Agent about?

According to the now deleted article, Rockstar North planned to split into two teams, one dedicated to GTA 4 DLC and the other to the since-canceled Agent, a spy game set in the 70s, which was going to be more linear than GTA and take place in several locations. There was a Mediterranean town and a Swedish ski resort. The story was also going to take place in Cairo and in space. As if that were not enough, the developer was also trying to make a zombie game, which was going to use the GTA Vice City graphics engine.

Rockstar Games is currently working on GTA 6, which will be officially shown at the beginning of December.