In gaming today, players are often more knowledgeable about the development process than they were ten or so years ago. We know now what stage a game is at, often informed officially by the developers themselves, and we know how long it takes to make games. However, one company that has retained a certain mystique is Rockstar.
Besides the obvious Grand Theft Auto VI leak, we're a bit in the dark on whatever Rockstar is up to, and the company would like to keep it that way. That's according to one former Grand Theft Auto developer, who claims that Rockstar asked for him to remove posts centred around abandoned Rockstar titles.
"I got an email from Rockstar North," wrote Obbe Vermeij, who worked at Rockstar until 2009. "Apparently some of the OGs 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."
Vermeij, in his now-deleted posts, talked a lot about a cancelled Rockstar game known as Agent. "The game was to be set in the 70s, be more linear than GTA with a number of locations," he claimed. "There was a French Mediterranean city, A Swiss ski resort, Cairo and at the end there would be a big shootout with lasers in space."
It was abandoned, however, with teams moving straight onto GTA San Andreas instead.