Grand Theft Auto 5 first released in 2013 (coming to PC in 2015), and from the vantage point of 2024 we can see it was a live game in disguise. The singleplayer side of the game, which for the first time featured three protagonists players could switch between on-the-fly, acted as Trojan horse for Rockstar's second swing at GTA Online, the multiplayer mode that would come to dominate the studio's time and attention and generate unfathomable levels of cash.
This meant that some plans went by the wayside. Originally GTA 5 had post-launch plans that were more in-line with GTA 4, which received two excellent singleplayer expansions: The Lost and the Damned, and The Ballad of Gay Tony. Rockstar was planning three singleplayer expansions for GTA 5, each themed around one of the game's protagonists, but after the launch itself re-focused on creating expansions for GTA Online (the studio first mentioned singleplayer DLC in 2013, but it would take until 2017 for its cancellation to be confirmed).
Thanks to dataminers, we know that the first expansion was named Agent Trevor, while the latter two had the working titles of "Zombie Apocalypse" and "Alien Invasion." Trevor's voice actor, Steve Ogg, recently appeared on a GTA livestream alongside Ned Luke (who played Michael) and Shawn Fonteno (Franklin) to shoot the breeze about their time working on the game (first spotted by the Loadout), and while doing so revealed that Rockstar had gone some way down the road before cancelling the expansion.
"We had that really cool shit where, and I forget if it was gonna be DLC, Trevor was gonna be undercover," says Ogg. "He works for the feds. And we did shoot some of that stuff with like James Bond Trevor: he’s still kind of a fuck up, but he’s doing his best to pretend to be like [an agent]. We shot some stuff and then it just disappeared and [Rockstar] never did it, and they never followed up on it."
The innate comedy of Trevor, essentially a deeply unpleasant sociopath, playing the part of a federal agent is obvious. And the Agent Trevor DLC was teased by Rockstar in-game with a jetpack, one of the more infamous Bond gadgets, suggesting this would've leaned heavily into the silly gadgets and set pieces, in the same way that Gay Tony wrapped a big bow around the fabulous excess possible in GTA 4.
Ned Luke says that a lot of these ideas ended up in DLC for GTA Online, which Ogg agrees with, before going on to muse about what would've been a fun aspect for GTA 5, and not just for his character.
"[Agent Trevor] would've been cool," says Ogg. "He got hired [by the Feds], that would've been fun, to follow a different journey. Y'know, like Franklin becomes born again or a Mormon or something [laughs] or a Hutterite and goes to make rabbit slippers on the colony [laughs]."
As if that doesn't make you ache enough for what we never had, the scuttlebutt is that Agent Trevor was planned to culminate with its very own Moonraker moment, that would see Trevor shooting off into space. Ned Luke mentions GTA Online and this is where Agent Trevor's best ideas ended up, mostly across the Doomsday heist with some in the Diamond Casino heist.
To briefly rewind to GTA 4's episodic DLC model, the problem there wasn't the quality (both were superb), but that Take Two and Rockstar felt they'd commercially underperformed (or as Take Two's then-CEO Ben Feder put it in 2009, "weren’t able to leverage GTA 4’s initial marketing campaign and initial launch fervor"). GTA Online, on the other hand, makes around half a billion dollars a year despite being a hot mess.
All eyes are on GTA 6 now, but while that game will be sold on its singleplayer mode it seems unlikely Rockstar will ever return to singleplayer DLC (it didn't even go there with Red Dead Redemption 2, which was crying out for its own Undead Nightmare). Agent Trevor is a glimpse at the road not travelled and, even though much of it ended up repurposed elsewhere, it's a pity we'll never get to see everyone's favourite psycho in a tux, ordering a vodka martini before burning it all down.
