Two former Rockstar Games developers have told Game Informer a bizarre, interesting, and scary story dating back to the early 2000s when the studio was developing Agent. Yes, that Agent that never saw the light of day.
The story goes something like this: a group of Rockstar artists went to Cairo, Egypt for a photography trip for Agent. They ended up being held under house arrest, almost had false charges slapped onto them, and nearly ended up in jail. The charges involved shooting pornography – a punishable crime in Egypt. Then project leader Luis Gigliotti had to call the United States’ embassy in Cairo to seek help, and was told by whoever answered the phone that the team was “stupid” for attempting what they did. Apparently, there are legal challenges involved in extensively photographing Cairo.
“In the end, it just seemed like, ‘Okay, well, some people have warned about it.’ But I guess it wasn’t obvious, at that time, that it was that extreme … It’s like, ‘Yeah, it’s an issue. We just won’t take photos of government buildings, and we should be fine. It’s the rest of the city that has to be photographed, so there’s plenty to do.'” former environment artist Joe Sanabria told Game Informer.
The dev team’s driver was nabbed by authorities in the middle of the night, and shortly afterwards, the artists were told that they weren’t allowed out of their rooms. They were then investigated for shooting porn. One of the team members, Darrell Gallagher, had left early to fly home but was grabbed at the airport and the authorities demanded to see the photos the team had been taking. “At that point we knew, okay, we potentially might be in trouble because we hadn’t taken anything that was illegal, but we had taken at that point probably 12,000 photos,” Sanabria recalled.
Eventually, the authorities let them go. However, the developers were tense throughout their trip to the airport and to the plane. The sighs of relief only came when the plane actually took off. “We’re all at the office, like 45 of us on pins and needles, and the phone rings,” said Gigliotti. “I pick it up and it’s one of my art leads and he just goes, ‘We made it. We’re on the runway, we’re taking off.’ We just cheered.”
What a trip! There’s a lot more to this story, so make sure to check out the full interview below.
[Source: Game Informer]
