The team of artists and developers from the company responsible for GTA V and Red Dead Redemption 2 were placed under house arrest.
Rockstar San Diego had a great project on their hands. Agent was announced years ago for PlayStation 3, but the project never came to fruition. Nearing the end of 2020 there is no trace of the video game, but GameInformer shares an interesting story about the development of the title. And it is that Luis Gigliotti, the leader of the project, lived a surreal situation with his team when they traveled to Cairo (Egypt) to work on the documentation: they were arrested and falsely accused of recording pornography, something that of course never happened.
The police authorities ordered Gigliotti and the rest of the creatives to be under house arrest, under completely false charges. Given this situation and given the seriousness of the accusations, they were forced to call the United States embassy as a matter of urgency. “I’ll never forget that whoever the person on the phone was told us, ‘Are you stupid? What made you think this was a good idea? “
False charges, photographs and escape
GameInformer recreates this bizarre story through the testimonies of Gigliotti himself and Joe Sanabria, responsible for the scenarios. It all starts as in many other video games, with a trip to a location to take photos that allow them to recreate the places as accurately as possible. The problem is that taking pictures is not always legal. The developers had heard of arrests taking place and that authorities were confiscating cameras, but still risked traveling and trying.
“One of the confrontations I had is when I took a photo on the main street and suddenly the secret police appeared, who started yelling at me,” recalls Sanabria. “But I didn’t understand what he was saying. Our partner told us that they wanted me to remove the film immediately, but you know, there was no film because it was a digital camera. ” After several unsuccessful exchanges, he decided to delete the images and everything was a scare. Another member of the team suffered a more serious mishap, when the police threatened him at gunpoint. “They ended up asking the tourist guide for an identity card,” which they then threatened.
The story, far from ending, took a more serious turn when the police mentioned that they had been told that they were in the country recording pornography. “They held the plane and told us: ‘Look, we received a tip that you are filming pornography in the country. We have to see the photos he had taken and your laptops, ”says Sanabria. At that point they really felt in trouble, because they hadn’t done anything illegal, but they did have 12,000 photographs. “If one of those photos contained something illegal, even by accident, the team could have faced jail.”
Gigliotti managed to speak to an embassy boss, who told them that Egyptian authorities had decided to fabricate false accusations to portray them as porn professionals. It didn’t help that one of the workers had borrowed his father’s work laptop, a gynecologist, who had pictures of vaginas on his hard drive. The team left the hotel, traveled to the airport, and finally managed to escape the nightmare. “The most stressful thing was waiting at the terminal, because we knew that Darrell had been caught just before boarding,” recalls Sanabria.
