2 years after the GTA 5 source code leak, fans think they’ve found the protagonist of Rockstar’s canceled PS3 spy epic buried in the files

For nearly 20 years, we’ve been wondering what Rockstar’s Agent would have looked like. Originally set for release on PS3, Agent was a Cold War-era spy game that disappeared from public view shortly after it was announced and was quietly canceled years later. Yet, vestiges of it still remain – including, it seems, in the GTA 5 source code.

The GTA 5 source code leaked late in 2023, and now, years later, Rockstar fans are still digging through the files trying to figure out what’s there. A 2025 thread on GTAForums purported to have uncovered four character models from Agent in that code, but a more recent post (via videotech on Twitter) from a user going by XanaBax suggests that three of those characters are from existing GTA games.

That last character, though? That “could actually be Agent’s protagonist,” XanaBax argues. It’s listed under a hierarchy labeled “player,” it looks similar to a model that appeared in previous Agent leaks, and it appears in a subfolder called “Jimmy,” which was Agent’s development codename.

You can check out the forum thread above for a look at the character model, but this is one of those instances where the circumstance of the discovery is probably more exciting than the discovery itself – after all, it’s pretty much just some guy in military camo.

But the notion of any vestige of Agent surviving after all these years is pretty exciting. This is one of those great mysteries of the PS3 era, and it’s tough to picture a AAA Rockstar project at this period being anything less than an all-time classic.

Of course, it’s easy to imagine Agent being incredible – apparently it was a lot harder to actually make that happen. Rockstar ultimately canned the game when it became clear that the stealth elements weren’t jiving with the game’s open-world design. “I question if you can even make a good open world spy game,” as Rockstar co-founder Dan Houser put it last year. Well, at least we can dream, right?

We may never get to play Agent, but GTA 6 is on the way alongside a whole lot of other notable upcoming games.

Dustin Bailey joined the GamesRadar team as a Staff Writer in May 2022, and is currently based in Missouri. He’s been covering games (with occasional dalliances in the worlds of anime and pro wrestling) since 2015, first as a freelancer, then as a news writer at PCGamesN for nearly five years. His love for games was sparked somewhere between Metal Gear Solid 2 and Knights of the Old Republic, and these days you can usually find him splitting his entertainment time between retro gaming, the latest big action-adventure title, or a long haul in American Truck Simulator.