Agent was a spy title announced by Rockstar that disappeared over time. The idea was for the game to take place in different locations around the world, allowing players to explore different cities. Washington, DC would be one of the available locations, functioning as the center of this open world while other cities would also be in the game, with some being more linear.
Cairo, a city located in Egypt, would be one of the explorable locations in the title, so a team from Rockstar San Diego had to research the city and get to know it better. First the team decided to look for images online, looking for references to create a map, but they couldn't find anything that was actually useful. After that, the team also looked for satellite imagery, again without success. The solution seemed simple: Travel to Cairo and take your own photos, since according to Luiz Gigliotti, project leader at Rockstar San Diego, it was a time when you could climb a building, take a photo with a digital camera and use the image as a texture map.
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Extreme stress situation
However, the trip turned into a nightmare. Team members who traveled to Cairo were detained by the authorities, under house arrest. One night, the group's driver was questioned by the local police, after which the team received information that they could no longer leave the rooms they were in.
The situation got even worse when Luis Gigliotti was informed by the embassy's security chief that the Egyptian authorities could find in pornography a way to accuse the team of doing something illegal in the country. The big problem is that one of the team members had a laptop that belonged to his father, who in turn was a gynecological oncologist, so the device contained images of female reproductive organs. Although this was not pornography, everyone was really extremely concerned because of the context of the whole situation.
Luis Gigliotti claimed he couldn't sleep as they were trying to save lives. It wasn't about video games, the subject they were used to. Fortunately, the entire team made it home safely, but Gigliotti remembers the situation as something insane, stating that sometimes everyone wonders what they were thinking at the time.
This whole crazy story can be seen in full here, in the Game Informer article.
