‘Grand Theft Auto’ developer almost made a “depressing” Scottish zombie game

A new blog post from an ex-Grand Theft Auto developer has shed light on a once-in-development zombie game at the studio, along with details on Agent, an abandoned spy game.

The blog post, written by ex-Rockstar North developer Obbe Vermeij, (now deleted, but still available through archive.org) revealed that after GTA: Vice City was released in late 2002, the Rockstar North team thought it would be “nice to do something else”. What the team settled on was a “zombie survival game”, with the idea being to “use the Vice [City] code as is.”

The reason for the game never really taking off, as Vermeij puts it, is that “the idea seemed depressing and quickly ran out of steam. Even the people who originally coined the idea lost faith.”

Vermeij then revealed new information on Agent, a spy thriller that Rockstar only formally abandoned in 2018, over a decade after the initial announcement. According to Vermeij, the game was “to be set in the ’70s” and would be “more linear than GTA with a number of locations”.

The game would be “classic James Bond“, but it eventually became “clear that Jimmy [the developmental codename for the game] was going to be too much of a distraction”. The title was then “handed over to another company within Rockstar but never got completed”.

The post is now offline, however, as Vermeij posted an update stating that he “got an email from Rockstar North”. Vermeij went on to clarify that “apparently some of the OG’s there are upset by my blog… something about ruining the Rockstar mystique or something.”

In other gaming news, Call Of Duty 2024 will reportedly be part of the Black Ops subseries of games and will be set in the Gulf War.