10 Mind-Blowing "What If?" Video Game Scenarios That Almost Happened

5. Rockstar Expand On L. A. Noire, Team Bondi, And Agent

Whore of the Orient
Team Bondi

Although L. A. Noire stands today as being one of the most divisive Rockstar releases of the past decade, there's no denying that the devs behind it, Team Bondi, made for a very talented team.

The title mixed the best bits of classic cop TV, real life crimes and history into an Confidential-esque journey into postwar California. It had the strongest Rockstar story yet, and while development was fraught with some very public issues before its release, fans were hopeful that Bondi were destined for great things.

It was never meant to be, sadly, and both an L. A. Noire sequel and Bondi's next game, the controversially titled Whore of the Orient, never saw the light of day.

Then there's the matter of Agent, Rockstar's long-gestating third-person title said to boast a Cold War setting. Meant to do to the espionage genre what Red Dead did to Westerns, nothing has been seen of the title since its initial 2009 announcement. The studio has probably moved onto other things at this point (namely the monolithic GTA franchise), and while no one can slight Rockstar for the quality of their titles, we've not seen anything along the lines of Redemption or Noire since.

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Content Producer/Presenter

WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well. In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.