A two-game franchise may seem somewhat thin material for a retrospective piece. But the story of the Thief games is one of richer history than many realizeThief and its successor are much more than the sum of their parts. The adventure that unfolds as you play them is intriguing enough, but when taken hand in hand with the corresponding real-life tale of innovation, corporate downfall, and the subsequent industry ripple effect, suddenly Thief’s dark milieu offers sufficient wealth to produce plenty of interesting reading.
Murder by Numbers
The world of Thief right now consists of Thief: The Dark Project and Thief 2: The Metal Age. The third and (probably) final installment, Thief: Deadly Shadows, is in development at ION Storm Austin and expected to ship May 26. Thief fans may also know that the original game is now available in three versions. There are classic Thief (1998); Thief Gold (1999), which includes three missions that didn’t make it into the original release; and Thief Platinum (2000), which is just a prepatched version of regular old Thief, without Gold’s additional levels. I’ll go over various options for getting your paws on these games, and compatibility with modern computers, later on.
Thief 2 shipped in the summer of 2000, scant months before Looking Glass Studios, the company responsible for the franchise, shut its doors forever. The Metal Age would be their last game. To understand Thief it is necessary to understand its pedigree, and we’ll get to that shortly. As this is a Thief retrospective and not a Looking Glass eulogy, however, if you want more info than this article offers, you can look here for Wagner James Au’s compelling account of the studio’s last days.
In 1996, Looking Glass designers contemplated a game universe set in a dystopian Camelot, an Arthurian legend turned on its ear: Mordred would be the misunderstood hero, Arthur the vicious tyrant. Dark Camelot was the foundation for what would eventually become Thief; as time went on and the Camelot idea faded (marketing insisted Arthurian legend was passé), the studio’s goals coalesced around a more undefined but equally descriptive nomenclature. Not yet sure what sort of game they were going to make, the team at Looking Glass started referring to their concept as the Dark Project.
I Only Lied about Being a Thief
Thief: The Dark Project opens to the scratching of a quill pen and a stylish cinematic composed of a mélange of heavily Photoshopped stills. In what is to become one of the franchise’s trademarks, each mission briefing begins with a text poem, prayer, song, or passage from one of the world’s many internecine factions. The most promising acolyte left usnot out of the lesser folly of sentiment, but out of the greater folly of anger. His heart was clouded and his balance lost, but his abilities were unmatched. Even then we knew to watch him most closely. A voiceover in a soft and sinister tone: “I have a simple job planned for tonight …”
Garrett is a cat burglar in the shadowy underworld of a mammoth, nameless urban sprawl, making his living by preying on the wealth of nobles and leisure society. From the beginning, it is clear that Garrett is no normal thief; his ability to conduct his profession borders upon the mystical. And well it might, as he was trained for a very different sort of life.
The Keepers are the chroniclers, prophets, and sentinels of the City’s secrets: the fly on the wall of history, always watching, never revealing. As such, they have a strict policy of nonintervention in City affairs, which of course means that they intervene all the time. Their acolytes are trained in semi-arcane skills that facilitate observation. Among these talents is the ability to vanish completely in semidarknessquite an asset for a budding property reallocation engineer.
Though little is ever revealed of Garrett’s history, we learn that he was trained as a Keeper but left the order before full initiation. Whether he once truly intended to join their ranks is anyone’s guess; he never says. The Keepers, in their usual Zen-like manner, let him go but have quietly kept tabs on their errant prodigal since the moment of his departure.
Garrett is an extremely complicated character. A creative misstep in the protagonist could have ruined the game, because on the surface he seems anathema to common game characters. He is no hero. To Garrett, the very suggestion that he might be righteous is an insult, and any gallantry of action is an accidental corollary to his real objective. He does what he does for personal gain, shamelessly pursuing material wealth.
He kills without thought, applying no value to any life but his ownbut not from a pathological thirst for violence. Garrett kills because he can, not because he wants or needs to. If he kills, it is because the life of his victim means nothing to him. For this reason, the violence in Thief is among the most wrenching in any first person game: it is possible to finish both without ever harming anyone, and taking a life therefore becomes an act of greater cruelty than it might in a game where violence is part of the equation.
Yet it is almost impossible not to like Garrett. He is more curmudgeonly than ogreish, narrating cutscenes and providing color commentary that’s as amiable as it is chilling. He bitches about the rent and the landlord, complains about the hassles of living downtown, tosses off dry one-liners belying a razor sense of humor, even cheerily dissects the psyches of his wealthy targets by evaluating their feng shui or literary collections.
He is also meticulous in his approach to his craft. To Garrett, thievery is a sacred act not to be demeaned by clumsy errors or casual amateurism. Though remorseless in the act of killing, he sees murder as a gauche vulgarity, unworthy of masters such as himself. Being a good thief means not needing to kill. Indeed, on the highest difficulty level, you are not allowed to kill at all. Playing missions at this expert level lays bare video games’ violent roots, because in a game, to kill is to simplify. By withholding that most basic of tools, Thief challenges us to approach its play as Garrett approaches his career: as an art form requiring patience and mastery. In becoming Garrett, if you choose to kill, you do so because it makes things easier for you.
To his intense frustration, Garrett finds himself dragged again and again into scenarios that require him to be the “hero.” He is just too good at what he does to escape the notice of those who would benefit from his talents. All too often one faction or another will make him an offer he can’t refuse. Though he’d probably stab anyone who suggested it, Garrett prefers to help the righteous rather than the wicked. His cantankerous, complaining anti-heroismhowever reluctantis nonetheless proof that underneath the greed, Garrett is a good man.
But don’t leave any jewelry unattended around him.
Boomtown
Just as Garrett is a protean labyrinth of motivations, his city reflects a pageant of human decadence and greed, welded to a backdrop of uneasy coexistence between magic and technology. Great chugging engines roar alongside streetlights hurling fountains of sparks high into the air. And everywhere are meters, switches, valves, gauges, pumps, levers; an iron nightmare of steam power gone wrong. This environment walks hand in wary hand with dark wizardry, mystical creatures and the cruel attentions of infernal deities that take a constant and active interest in the goings on of mortal lives.
Among the boilers and incantations dwell the City’s people, living as they can in a world locked in a conflict between the natural and unnatural, the real and manufactured. Cults and secret societies abound, law and order are frameworks at best; every man, woman, and child is out for himself. It is a dangerous place to live.
The Hammers rule the streets, a religious sect as harsh and unyielding as the steel that forges their eponymous weapons. When City law waits too long or is too impartial in its application of justice, the Hammerites take it into their own hands: conducting raids, placing arrests, and freely incarcerating in private stockades those who fail to live up to their totalitarian views of morality. The Hammers are religious vigilantism at the height of madness, more powerful and better armed by far than the corrupt and outnumbered City constabulary.
Contrary to the rigidly implacable Hammers lie the Pagans, dwellers on the City’s rims and outskirts. Worshippers of the Woodsie Lord, an ancient sylvan force of terrifying deific power, the Pagans seek always to overthrow the technology they see as a desecration of the natural world, to smash the machines and break the girders of the City, to return society to the simplicity of a time before progress.
The City is a living character in the narrative of the Thief games. Garrett’s home is as central as Garrett himself to the mythology. Deadly Shadows promises a living City, full of passers-by with pockets ripe for the picking and homes free for plunder. The City remains the great enigma of Thief: vast and incomprehensible, a breathing entity as hard and cruel as the mysterious primitive world outside, a technological Gormenghast holding Arcadian fantasy at bay by means of gears, coal, and dark magics. It is upon this shuddering mean of devilry and mechanism that Garrett preys.
Dark Matter
Thief introduced gamers to the “first person sneaker” style; it is the first major FPS that focused on stealth, caution, and planning over balls-to-the-wall action. For this reason, some people found it dull and others got frustrated when standard Quake-style tactics got Garrett killed faster than an Avalanche fan in the Red Wings locker room. Nowadays, stealth-based shooters are commonplace; Thief gave birth to this subgenre.
Thief’s focus on stealth was innovative in several ways. Because a stealthy game is a slower game, designers could linger on features that would be missed in a fast-paced shooter. Missions show more attention to detail and adherence to architectural logic. Controls such as leaning and peeking are added to the standard FPS toolbox, making it easier for players to manage the furtive style. Light and sound, especially locational sound, take on significantly greater importance. Because of all this, the game needed some specialized technology under the hood.
Thief employed a new codebase called, predictably, the Dark Engine. Realistic light and sound are so important in Thief that a licensed technology such as Quake 2, in addition to delaying the game’s release, might not have handled wave physics well enough to make it work. Most light and sound algorithms in other games focus on special effects over realism, which wouldn’t help in a stealth context. Also, a proprietary 3D engine developed by Looking Glass would have the added advantage of being available for future projects and possible licensing opportunities.
The Dark Engine presents a stylized, angular visual aspect that is pretty effective at evoking the City’s rust-filled nuances. For an engine developed in the late nineties, it does an incredible job with physics such as explosions and falling objects, as well as sound and light. The game world also looks realistic despite a comparatively low polygon count versus Unreal, one of Thief’s contemporaries. Since the engine didn’t choke the processor with polygons, more CPU power was available for all those physics calculations. It also meant that Thief had reasonable system requirements.
Modern gamers won’t find too much to complain about with the Dark Engine. They’re yesterday’s graphics, but they hold up surprisingly well. Though Dark supported only a rather low maximum resolution (1024×768) and could be twitchy about EAX-enhanced audio, it was otherwise stable and performed well. The only other significant anachronism is the light. Lighting technology has undergone a major revolution recently with the addition of shaders and soft shadows, and we’re spoiled by modern dynamic lighting algorithms.
It’s also a dark game, and irritable players groused about “looking for the black object on the black shelf in the black room surrounded by blackness.” Yes, Thief is dark. But the game’s really meant to be played with the lights off. So much of it depends on creeping from shadow to shadow that dimness is vital. An icon whose varying states you’d better get really good at interpreting announces how much light you happen to be in at the present time, and with practice you can quickly identify which light sources are your biggest threats and should therefore be extinguished posthaste.
It’s a little primitive given today’s Dolby sound and 7.1 speaker setups, but for the time, Thief was the Saruman’s voice of game audio. Sounds reverberated differently depending on the size of the area and the surfaces against which they bounced, and every whisper and tap was a clue to the presence of an adversary or a potential alarm to a vigilant lookout.
Since ambient sound is so critical to concealment and success, there is not much in the way of music in Thief outside of the cutscenes. The mission soundtrack is composed mostly of environmental noisefootsteps, voices, the growls of nearby machinery. What musical presence there is focuses largely on stimulating a mood, employing bass and long, tonal beats rather than tunes. The soundtrack is evocative of how music was handled in X-Com.
Accompanying you on your quest to liberate the City’s wealthy of their trinkets is a staggering assortment of tools, bought with your earnings from the previous mission. Garrett owns a sword, a bow, and a blackjackthe latter will be your most potent weapon, allowing you to knock guards and potential witnesses out rather than permanently harming them. He also has access to various potions, lockpicks, distractions such as flash grenades, maps and tips from his hoodlum contacts, and, for dessert, a luscious buffet of multifunctional arrows.
Garrett’s bow is more a toolbox than a weapon; he’d be lost without it. Broadhead Arrows are for standard offense; Water Arrows contain a crystal vial of the stuff at the head and are your best friend if you need to extinguish an inconvenient light source or clean up a spot of blood. Moss Arrows carpet the ground in soft greenery, allowing you to pass unheard; Rope Arrows grant access to otherwise unwinnable heights; Fire Arrows detonate like grenades.
You generally have a minimum cash objective in each mission, and it’s in your best interest to grab all the money you can, because it’s what you have to spend on gear for whatever comes next. Some have complained that leftover cash and equipment doesn’t carry over from mission to mission. Though unrealistic, it’s necessary to maintain balance. You never use up all your stuff on a mission, and you rarely spend down to zero while preparingso if you were able to keep leftovers, you could waltz through the final missions armed to the teeth. That’s not what Thief is about. Sometimes it’s better to sacrifice realism in favor of rightness, and I’m curious to see if Deadly Shadows follows this paradigm or establishes another.
Stealing First: The Dark Project
The Dark Project introduces us to Garrett and sends him on a series of increasingly challenging objective-based missions, throughout and between which the game’s intricate story is told. This franchise is fairly unique in the way it employs cutscenes. Rather than grainy video or clumsy in-engine cinematics, Thief collages hand-drawn stills and photographs with voiceover narration and dialogue. It’s sort of reminiscent of how documentaries manage without supplementary video: a carefully orchestrated dance of relevant emotional and rational iconic connections. That Thief’s cutscenes are still among the most impactful of any game proves that it works.
A scaling difficulty allows the gamer to move among Normal, Hard, and Expert between each mission. The number, complexity, and challenge of objectives increases with difficulty levels, and the amount of damage Garrett can take before dying is drastically reduced.
The first game plays on Garrett’s greed. He is contacted by an inscrutable and somewhat creepy new face in City crime, a woman named Viktoria. She has popped up apparently out of nowhere and raised the eyebrows of the City’s organized thieving guilds. Information on her is sparse, but she seems to have plenty of money to throw at freelance home invaders, whom she employs to gather various unique treasures.
Viktoria in turn introduces Garrett to Constantine, another city newcomer. An eccentric aristocrat with highly unsettling taste in home décor, Constantine offers Garrett an enough-to-retire-on sum to steal a magical gem called the Eye from an abandoned, haunted Hammer cathedral deep in a forgotten City district. It is a major, multi-mission undertaking, and Garrett gets involved not realizing that all is not as it seems.
A long-term plot has been underway to unleash the dormant malice of the Woodsie Lord and return the Pagans to dominance, a plot in which the Eye is of pivotal importance. The Hammers and Keepers are preliminary targets, as those groups are among the few who could stand a chance against the wrath of a fully manifested Woodsie Lord should the Pagan scheme come to fruition.
Garrett wants nothing to do with any of ithe just wants the moneybut finds himself entwined in the perilous conspiracy all the same. He feels no loyalty to the Keepers, notwithstanding the fact that they provided many of the skills on which he now depends; and he absolutely loathes the Hammerites and their holier-than-thou morality. Still, they both make better cohorts than the Pagans, whose chummy relationship with the demon world and unpleasant habit of human sacrifice make then a distasteful ally. Besides, Garrett reasons, a burglar wouldn’t have much to do if primeval forest replaced all of the cities.
The Invisible War
Looking Glass wasn’t entirely sure that The Dark Project would be well received by a public with very specific views on what first person should be like. It was a major departure from “traditional” FPS of the time, and stealth gameplay was new territory. Though everyone at Looking Glass thought the storyline would offset any potentially dull areas in gameplay, they decided to hedge their bets a little.
So they tossed in some levels that focused more on exploration and the supernatural, as well as the odd jumping puzzle here and there. The Dark Project includes five or six levels that contain few if any human beings, instead seeing Garrett robbing tombs, exploring infested parts of the City, navigating haunted mines, and so forth.
Stealth is still important in these missions. Garrett is not a warrior and avoids confrontation when he can. Though he’s armed, evasion is his chief tactic. A blackjack to the nape of the neck is a lot safer than a frontal assault against armored opponents. When it comes to creatures from beyond, however, standard defensive tactics don’t always apply. Ghosts and zombies are not susceptible to being knocked out, so straight-up butchery becomes a more realistic alternative, and seems somehow less contrary to the game’s cautious spirit than killing peopleyou can’t feel bad about killing things that are already dead. The thinking was that these levels would add some excitement while remaining faithful to the take-care roots of the stealthy experience.
It also expanded the foundation of the Thief universe by broadening the game’s fiction. Other surprise life forms hint at the City’s history or have become cult favorites among gamers. The City sits astride the ruins of a much more ancient habitation. At one point in The Dark Project, Garrett is obliged to explore some of these catacombs, and he discovers that the region was once occupied by an alien and hideous form of life. Some of these horrors still lurk in the channels below the new metropolis, gazing enviously at the world that was once theirs.
Less malevolently unnatural but equally lethal are Burricks, overweight lizards that resemble waddling gila monsters until they belch a fatally toxic gas cloud in your direction. These creaturesespecially the Burricks, which would actually be kind of adorable if they weren’t so dangerousare as much a part of Garrett’s world as the City and its occupants. So to the casual observer, the addition of some combat, monster stuff, and jumping puzzles would benefit the overall product. It would seem, however, that Looking Glass underestimated its audience.
What little negative press Thief endured was focused chiefly on complaints about the missions that weren’t burglary-specific. Some felt the haunted levels broke the “flow” of the game, that evading or fighting nonhuman opponents was less a thrill than sneaking past mundane guards. And though they were minimal compared to most shooters, the jumping puzzles were just annoying.
I agree with the final complaint (jumping puzzles are always annoying as far as I’m concerned), but I’m one of the few who enjoyed the more fantastic levels as much as those in which the opponents were strictly human. The Dark Project can be a very, very scary game, one that raises goosebumps on your arms and makes you jump or glance uneasily over your shoulder. The haunted and monster-infested levels dramatically enhanced this quality, without sacrificing stealth. However, I apparently am among a very select few who thought so. The vast majority of gamers told Looking Glass that they wanted any sequels to focus more exclusively on human adversaries.
Thief Gold adds three new levels that didn’t make it into the original Thief due to time constraints. These aren’t clumsy, slapped-in additionsthe new missions feel as professional as the old ones. My personal favorite, The Songs of the Caverns, would be worth the price of admission on its own. Conveniently, Thief Gold is more readily available than The Dark Project, so chances are you’ll get to enjoy the “full” version of the game whether you want to or not.
Case Closed
The Dark Project is a sublime gaming experience. If you can play it in the right environmentalone, in the dark, ideally in the still quiet of a late nightyou’ll be frankly amazed at its ability to build and evoke suspense and fear. Remember when Resident Evil first appeared, before the flood of survival horror began and we all got inured? Remember how scary it was? The Dark Project does it better and goes a step further by including a rich and vivid story ripe with characters so intriguing and history so abundant and diverse that you’ll feel as though you’re playing your favorite fantasy novel.
Both PC Gamer and Computer Gaming World include The Dark Project high in their “best games of all time” lists. At about 800,000 units worldwide, it was too successful to be described as a “cult” classic but not successful enough to be described as a runaway best seller. It is consistently honored alongside Half-Life as the best single-player FPS experience available. But it wasn’t a blockbuster, and a lot of potential fans who don’t know what they’re missing never played it.
In many ways, The Dark Project is a story about the Pagans, focusing as it does on the return of the Woodsie Lord and the inroads that Pagan society has made into the heart of the City. While their tree-hugging hippie terrorist attitude isn’t strictly evil, their tactics are reprehensible and occasionally monstrous. The Pagans are secretive, adding to their perceived malevolence; their looming incursion and the apocalyptic threat of their conspiracy transforms a simple tree-worshipping cult into a dark and hostile force of unknown size and capability.
And yet, their plot is the last act of a desperate people, and as such the lengths to which they will go are partially excusable. One can’t help but feel a twinge of sympathy for the Pagans. They are forced to live and worship on the dwindling outskirts of a world that to them has grown increasingly alien and threatening, doomed bystanders who see the withering day by day of their cherished sylvan utopia. In the world of Thief, there are no clear cut heroes or villainsjust allies and enemies. Merely different points of view, all struggling for survival. By the end of The Dark Project, this enemy is defeated but not destroyed.
With the Pagan star fading, Thief 2: The Metal Age turns its attention to a very different culture: a cold, mechanical religion whose devotees treasure constructs of whirling gears and pressure valves over the more intangible quality of mere humanity.
Stealing Second: The Metal Age
Thief 2 begins about a year after its predecessor, and big changes have come to the City in the intervening months. Through no fault of his own, Garrett’s life is at a low point, and he greets us with frustration approaching despondency: “I’ve always equated emotionalism with getting caught. Both get in the way of my money.”
He has a right to be pissed. It’s harder than ever to be a thief in the City. Law enforcement, once emasculated and feeble compared to the will and weaponry of the Hammers, has enjoyed a major renaissance. There’s a new sheriff in town, Gorman Truart, and he’s made it his mission to clean up the streets. What’s worse, he seems to have a special animosity toward Garrett.
Truart’s crime fighting techniques focus on the application of extreme violence and Gestapo-style secret police conduct. Anyone even suspected of wrongdoing simply disappears. He is relentless in his persecution of the City’s poor and criminal culture. It’s so bad that even a master thief like Garrett has difficulty planning and pulling off jobs. He grumbles that if things get any worse, he’ll be reduced to picking pockets in the streeta dangerous career indeed, given the ubiquity of Truart’s bluecoats.
The meteoric rise in the influence of law enforcement has been paralleled by the equally sudden collapse of the Hammerite church. Recent internal disputes have left the sect in chaos. About half of its former strength bolted to join a protest movement organized by Karras, a former Hammer with an incredibly irritating speech impediment. The schism is fueled by his contention that the Hammers have misinterpreted the tenets of their deity, the Master Builder. Enlightenment, he argues, can only be achieved through progress, and progress means machines. Thus is the birth of the Mechanists.
“What’s the big deal?” you say. There are already plenty of machines in the City, great coal-gobbling behemoths chugging and rumbling and ticking away. Exactly what they do is a mystery, but the City’s foundation is built as much on steel as it is on magic. So one might wonder what it matters that another cult espousing the glory of the machine is born. But Mechanist machines are different: graceful, elegant, functional, and frankly creepy. Whereas the steam-powered City sported a certain lumbering Victorian charm, Mechanist technology reeks of Big-Brotherist corruption.
As if Truart weren’t bad enough, the wealthy can now install Mechanist-constructed cameras that sound warning klaxons when they spy something untoward. The really wealthy can buy Children, great hulking robots that mutter alarming Mechanist slogans to themselves as they trudge about, using nightvision, laser sights, and cannons to pummel unlucky trespassers with explosive shells. Only a water arrow to the boiler can bring these monstrosities down, and hitting a target that small with a projectile that imprecise isn’t as easy as bullseyeing a Womprat.
In the battle between mechanica and electronica, the Hammers are losing. While the Mechanists haven’t done anything outwardly illegal or even strictly wrong, there’s something unnerving about them. Even Garrett, who usually could not care less about City politics, takes note. The Mechanist presence is like having a spider on your back. A big, metal, electronic spider with diode eyes and fangs that drip alternating current.
Thus, when we meet up with Garrett in The Metal Age, he’s got all that on his mind, plus the fact that the first mission is one of helping out a colleague who’s fallen in love. People in love irritate Garrett, as do zealous law enforcement and cults that build tools specifically designed to antagonize thieves. So he’s not in the best temper at the beginning of The Metal Age, and his mood declines as the game progresses.
Thief 2 is longer, more difficult, and requires much more care and patience. It also sports a more complex and intricate story than the original, as the Keepers drag the unwilling Garrett into the Hammer/Mechanist rivalry even as he tries to dodge Sheriff Truart.
Respecting fan wishes, it offers very few encounters with the supernatural. I don’t recall a single Burrick in the game. A Thief without Burricks is like a DOOM without fire imps; it’s unnatural. As I’m apparently alone in really loving the paranormal stuff from Thief, I’m not going to whine about it much more. Still, in this case I think the developers made a mistake in doing what the fans asked, because it diluted the emotional impact of the game experience. Thief 2 is less hair-raising and suspenseful than its predecessorthere are a few spine-chilling scenes, but not many. The Metal Age has a blander flavor; despite the mysticality of the plot, it comes off as a more mundane adventure than the colorful tapestry of The Dark Project.
It does paint a clearer picture of Garrett himself. He’s the great draw of the Thief games. Everyone who plays them likes him, though no one could say why; he is a shuttered personality. Indeed, you never even see his face in the first two games. For most gamers, learning more about him becomes a play challenge. Garrett almost seems wasted in a medium where others are expected to assume control of him. There’s so much depth that in some ways, I’d rather watch passively and see who he is rather than risk screwing him up by doing it myself.
The tantalizing glimmer of compassion beneath the brash sarcasm and remorseless greed, the question marks in his history, the uncertainty about his futurethis is expertly woven into the plot of The Metal Age. There are moments when Garrett is hurt and terribly afraid, when he bears witness to atrocities so appalling that even his determinedly unethical nature is shakenthere are even times when he (grudgingly) says something nice to someone else and actually means it. Thief 2 may be a more disappointing game than the original, but it is priceless as a tool for understanding Garrett and his world.
The Metal Age is also more generous with access to the City. Garrett’s burg was presented mostly as tantalizing glimpses from windows or over garden walls in the original; only one levelThe Haunted Cathedraltook place entirely in the City streets, and that in a section that got invaded by demons, burned down, fell over, and had to be walled off by the authorities. The City is just an appetizer in The Dark Project; here it’s part of the main course.
Whole missions take place on its streets, while one of the very best is a spectacular aerial romp from buttress to buttress as Garrett employs the “Thieves Highway” of lore to close in on a target unnoticed. The Mechanist presence is profoundly felt during these excursions: their factories loom on distant skylines, the great metal citadel towers over the horizon, and overheard conversations speak of black lung disease, neighborhoods coated in soot, and blue-collar humans increasingly replaced by robots.
The Dark Engine gives an encore performance in Thief 2. By 2000 it was no longer graphically competitive, though it still handled physics better than anything else out there. It was retooled to support higher polygon counts and 32-bit color, which helped, and Looking Glass artists went a little crazy locating or making unique textures for just about every surface. Still, it was the angular, fabricated look and feel that’s a Thief cornerstone that kept people from shouting “dated graphics” (though some did anyway). It would have been weird if it looked like NOLF or Quake 3.
Deadly Shadows, by the way, abandons the lanky stylized look of its forebears. We’ll see how much this departure affects the flavor of the game.
True Crime
But all in all, The Metal Age didn’t work as well. It felt uneven, rushed, somehow clumsylacking the crystalline elegance of The Dark Project. The reappearance of popular characters such as the mysterious Viktoria doesn’t produce the desired effect of connecting the two games. And its more elaborate story ultimately didn’t make a lot of sense. In fact, the script seems dissatisfied with itself, as if its writers knew that their idea needed additional time in the oven. Garrett, when speaking, seems more aggravated by the occasional awkwardness of the game than by the crappiness of his life. It’s hard to put a finger on exactly what is disappointing, except to say that it felt rushed, but how it felt rushed is difficult to vocalize.
The practicalities of the game were all decidedly superior. The Dark Engine’s facelift was effective; audio, light, scripting, and artificial intelligence systems had been tweaked; there are fifteen missions to The Dark Project’s twelve, and all the missions were significantly longer. The Metal Age was a solid 30 to 50 hours of gameplay, which is plenty of bang for the buck. But some of the heart wasn’t there.
Be advised that describing it as a “disappointment” is only applicable in comparison to its predecessor. I don’t know anyone who likes The Metal Age better than The Dark Project, but compared to normal games, it was quite astounding for all the same reasons that the original had been the first story-driven stealth shooters were and still are the best.
Where It’s Due
You can’t make a great game without a strong team and a coherent creative vision. Further, those who portray a narrative game’s characters must be fully in tune with the wishes of its authors.
The Dark Project was helmed by Greg LoPiccolo, who left Looking Glass for Harmonix shortly after the game’s release. He, along with Lead Designer Tim Stellmach and Ken Levinewho created the original game conceptwere largely responsible for the flavor of Thief. Looking Glass lifer Steve Pearsall took on project lead chores for The Metal Age and worked hard to maintain consistency with the mythos and universe that had already been created.
Multi-hatted Terri Brosius, who is credited merely as a “designer” on both games, was in fact a major contributor to the Thief universe, especially fiction and backstory, and helped write both scripts. As if that weren’t enough, she designed some of the game’s better missions and voiced the enigmatic Viktoria, which is a tough role to play well.
Fans of the System Shock games may also recognize her as SHODAN, the world’s sexiest evil-but-conflicted supercomputer, and as Marie Delacroix, hapless French inventor of FTL drive and one of SHODAN’s later victims. She also plays the too-weird-to-not-be-on-lithium helicopter pilot Ava Johnson in Deus Ex: Invisible War and has one-line parts in far too many other games to mention.
Terri is working with the Thief 3 team at ION Storm, where her background and vocal prowess will doubtless come in handy. Indeed, this time she’s one of the primary architects of the game plot and script. Given the quality of her creative work in the past, that’s a very good thing.
Actor Stephen Russell plays Garrettand about nine million other tiny roles in the Thief gamesand he’s so good that you simply couldn’t imagine the character sounding like anyone else. It goes without saying by this point that Garrett is a complicated fellow, and a lot of his personality must be conveyed in how he says things. Sarcastic, dry, slightly amused, but with a sharp edge warning of a capability for shocking violence, Russell’s portrayal of Garrett is spot-on. Listening to actors like Brosius and Russell leaves limited sympathy for developers that cut costs by stuffing janitors and interns in the sound studio and handing them a script.
A lot, but by no means all, of the original Thief crew are working with ION Storm on Deadly Shadows. That is obviously good news because they’re likely to stay as faithful as possible to the existing work, and they have every reason to make it a great gaming experience. This is a group of people who have in some cases been with the Thief universe for eight years, who have a right to see it through to the end, who have worked hard and suffered through corporate malfeasance and publisher bullying, who have always focused on one goal: to make Thief the very best it could possibly be. And they are not necessarily culpable for any shortcomings in the previous games.
Like fans, most Looking Glass alums weren’t thrilled with The Metal Age, and with good reason. By the time the game shipped, Looking Glass was in serious financial hot water. They shipped it before it was ready and they know itbut they did it because they had to. Had it not been for the financial problems, they’d likely have let it slip a bit and shipped it in December of 2000 rather than June.
Equally unfortunate is the fact that Looking Glass didn’t realize its demise was imminent when it released the game. It ends with a staggeringly anticlimactic climax and zero closurein fact, it ends with a question that was to have been answered at the beginning of Thief 3. But the arrival of Thief 3 would take a lot longer than anyone anticipated. And so the middle of this story is also the end: the oblivion of Looking Glass was near at hand when The Metal Age reached store shelves, and the series was not to be reborn for many years.
Through a Glass, Darkly
Looking Glass Studios was heralded since its foundation as an innovator in gaming. The studio worked hard to promote the notion that games are an entertainment art form. Founded by past employees of Origin Systems and Microprose when those two now-defunct companies were at the height of their glory, Looking Glass games were award winners, critical favorites, academic darlings. And unlike irritatingly pretentious “artsy” games like Galapagos or Eve or Bad Mojo, Looking Glass made art really, really fun.
It was built on the most solid foundation imaginable: the Ultima franchise. In 1992 Origin published Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss, a spinoff of the seminal RPG series. It was produced by respected industry vet Warren Spector, whose rap sheet reads like a who’s who of awards and critical approbation. He also helmed the award-winning Ultima 7 Part 2Serpent Isle and The Silver Seed and served as associate producer of Wing Commander, Privateer, Martian Dreams, and Ultima 6, among othersall before joining Looking Glass in 1992. Given his history with the Ultima games, he was the logical choice to helm production of the studio’s first major release, Ultima Underworld 2: The Labyrinth of Worlds. Both Ultima Underworld games have long been heralded as pivotal moments in first-person and narrative game design.
But like many innovators, Looking Glass was often ahead of its time. It produced highly cerebral game experiences, and early-nineties audiences, still evolving a basic grammar of modern gaming and its fundamentals, weren’t ready for them. This fact was illustrated most sharply with the release of System Shock (1994), a complex genre-bending FPS that combined elements of action, role playing, survival horror, and adventure into a single package.
Revered to the point of gushing by press, players weren’t ready for such depth and complexity in a shooter, which by then had been defined as a mindless blasting platform. Ironically, it wound up posting reasonably good numbers in the end. But System Shock sold so slowly that its tortoiselike climb into the black did little for the studio’s financial stability. The company’s next offerings, Terra Nova and the Flight Unlimited series, also received critical acclaim but didn’t really burn up sales charts. It was around this time that the Dark Camelot idea was born, and concept discussions for the game began.
Spector left to join ION Storm early in The Dark Project’s development; contrary to popular belief, his role in the production of the first two Thiefs is reasonably limited. Other departures were to follow. Given the revolutionary style of stealth elements and patience-required gameplay, the team wasn’t quite sure that its game was fun, so anxiety ran high. Creative innovator that it was, however, Looking Glass chose to see the project through to its conclusion. Even if the game flopped, they’d have a proprietary engine and probably some good lessons learned. Still, there was some worry about the future of both the game and the company.
But industry press, which had always held Looking Glass in very high esteem, latched onto the Thief concept and generated significant anticipatory buzz in advance of the title’s release. Thanks to this attention, the one-level demo was widely downloaded, so when The Dark Project arrived in December of 1998, fans knew what to expect and handed over their cash. It didn’t make sales history, but it had been a fairly affordable game to produce, and EidosThief’s publishergot its money back. Looking Glass, on the other hand, was feeling the crunch of a string of titles that had produced only ho-hum sales. No bombs, but no blockbusters.
Some of this pressure ought to have been alleviated in 1999 with the release of System Shock 2, a game whose history is inextricably linked with that of Thief. Despite an avalanche of coverage from a gaming press still tormented by guilt over its failure to make the original a hit, System Shock 2 didn’t move the numbers it needed to. Nowadays it’s a hall of fame title, a hands-down, flat-out classicso is the original. But it’s a little late.
To this day, System Shock 2 is considered by many to be the most frightening PC game ever made. Its uncanny ability to terrify and its vivid blend of story, character, and action are direct results of lessons learned from Thief. It’s even built on the same engine.
Looking Glass didn’t directly develop System Shock 2. They had teamed with Irrational Games (later known for Freedom Force) and would continue to work closely with them, swapping employees and intellectual property. This relationship started to crumble later, but during the development of System Shock 2 the studios were so incestuous that it could be difficult to tell where one ended and the other began.
Even as Looking Glass coordinated with Irrational to produce System Shock 2, it was also hard at work developing The Metal Age. Very preliminary ideas for Thief 3 were also being bandied about. Here, however, the cracks really began to show.
The Thief franchise is published by Eidos Interactive, which had sprung into relevance with the publication of Core Design’s Tomb Raider. With mad money rolling in from the Tomb Raider games, in 1996when Thief was just a zygotethe company went on a shopping frenzy. It was looking for a trophy studiosome prestige deal that would secure it a position among the big daddies of the game publishing biz. It found that prize in the form of a six-game exclusive agreement to publish a new studio that, at the time, was considered the Holy Grail of game development. This new developer was called ION Storm.
This is a drastic simplification, but the relationship of ION to the Thief games was that Warren Spector had once worked for Looking Glass and now worked for ION Storm, and that Eidos was publishing both. We all know what happened (check here for the viciousbut accurateDallas Observer column that began ION Storm’s shameful public slide into oblivion), so we’ll only rehash the most relevant details.
By 1999, The Metal Age was deep in development and within budget. Over in ION Storm’s Dallas office, Daikatana and Anachronox were already years late and had sonic-boomed millions of dollars past their respective development allocations. What had once been Eidos’s trophy wife was now its gold-digging albatross. ION Storm squandered so relentlessly that it threatened to empty the coffers of its huge, multinational publisher. Despite that publisher’s heroic determination to cover the burn rates of both studios, after the ION Storm vacuum passed through the Eidos vault, there wasn’t much left for Looking Glass.
It’s very important to point out here that the ION Storm of that time was essentially two studios: the Dallas office was the fiscally irresponsible one unable to complete a game on time or within budget. The Austin office, beavering away at Deus Ex under Warren Spector, was financially stable and firing on all cylinders. ION Austin had little contact with the Dallas office and wasn’t culpable in any of the press debacles that hounded the company’s implosion. Only the Austin location exists today, and it shares nothing but a name with the cataclysmic flatline of the past. Gamers must realize that to associate a negative connotation with today’s ION Storm is unfair and inaccurate.
Shortly after The Metal Age shipped, the Looking Glass board met and confirmed that there was no money left in the kitty. Rather than endure a torturous, humiliating, and almost certainly hopeless bankruptcy reorganization, the privately held studio laid everyone off and locked the doors.
Many opine that Eidos didn’t do enough to save Looking Glass, and also that it was ION Storm’s fault the company went under. Satisfying as it would be to assign villainy, neither allegation is true.
Eidos loyally covered Looking Glass’s burn rate despite the studio’s history of great games that neither flopped nor flew. ION Storm, meanwhile, had no vested interest in the failure of Looking Glass. The only way it could be perceived as “their fault” is if one blames them for wasting Eidos money that could have been spent saving the other company.
The press release announcing the fall of Looking Glass ricocheted a collective gasp of shock through the industry. No one had appreciated the studio while it was alive. Only its death rattle alerted us to the fact that it had represented the spirit of something we needed: a spirit now vanished, dissipated, never to return. It was the lantern bearer of the games-as-art concept, and it was gone. Those who comprehended the scale of the loss understood that the demise of Looking Glass Studios would scar the face of the industry forever. Every artistic medium has to suffer its blackest day. The Beatles broke up, RKO went under, Welles was fired, Van Gogh committed suicide, Poe died penniless and loathed. Video games had to endure the breaking of Looking Glass.
Back to the Future: Deadly Shadows
And so the series hit an unexpected snag. The Metal Age ended with little closure in anticipation of a sequel, but with Looking Glass out of business, the rights to Thief floated in limbo. Many Looking Glass employees wound up back with Spector at ION Storm Austin, and in 2001 that studio nabbed the rights to the Thief franchise and began work on Thief 3, which was originally to be subtitled The Dark Age.
ION Storm has been mum on Deadly Shadows details until very recently, when a new website and a blizzard of press releases amped up the buzz on this game. Where The Dark Project was a Pagan story and The Metal Age was a Hammer story, Deadly Shadows closes the circle by focusing its attention on the third major City power: the Keepers. They’ve stumbled upon an apocalyptic prophecy and Garrettin a revelation sure to infuriate himfigures prominently. Once again he’s dragged into other people’s problems, as his alma mater recruits him to help uncover the meaning of the grim divination. As he gets too close to certain secrets meant to stay buried, however, the Keepers turn on him, and he’s on his own.
We can expect a more persistent world in Deadly Shadows. It looks like the game will remain mission-driven, but Garrett apparently will also have access to the City along with his various story targets. Among other things, a new living economy model implies that you’ll be responsible for making your living as a thiefpicking pockets, robbing houses, and so forth, then fencing what you steal for cash to buy equipment. Most tools of the trade from the old games will make a return appearance, along with some interesting new gadgets that will make life as a possessions redistribution operative that much easier.
The Havok middleware physics engine will be employed to great effect in Deadly Shadows. As studios get more and more comfortable with the awesome power of Havokwhich most gamers first saw in Max Payne 2it will become possible to build increasingly realistic physical models. I don’t think it’s an overstatement to say that Havok will change the way we play games forever. Overall, buzz coming out of ION Storm is that Deadly Shadows is an improvement in every way to its technical predecessor, Deus Ex: Invisible War.
Project lead Randy Smith, who started his career in gaming with Thief as a junior designer at Looking Glass (he is responsible for the pants-wettingly scary “Return to the Cathedral” mission), has generously made himself accessible to fans and members of the press alike. He donated some of his time to speak with me at the Game Developers Conference last March.
Regrettably, many of the questions that deal with the ION Storm/Looking Glass/Thief collective are unpleasant, and some are downright rude. Alas that the most insolent question of all was the one that, in the context of a Thief retrospective, I most had to ask.
Is the PC version of Thief 3 going to be the disaster that the PC version of Deus Ex: Invisible War was?
For the record, I didn’t phrase it quite so bluntly when I spoke with Randy at the GDC, but I was pretty damn blunt and he had every right to end the conversation there. But he didn’t, and he answered my questionsrude and otherwisewith tact and candor. I thanked him privately then and do so publicly now, not only for his frank responses, but for his willingness to answer my questions in the first place.
Before we get to his answer, let’s look at why it needed to be asked.
ION Storm released Deus Ex: Invisible War for PC and Xbox last December, and few will argue that the PC version of the game plays like a clumsy afterthoughtan afterthought so egregiously ill-conceived and poorly executed that it took five months, two patches, a fan-made texture pack, and an avalanche of default.ini tweaks whose complexity approaches that of brain surgery to make the game what it is today: vaguely playable on hardware so powerful that only the most up-to-date gamers have a chance at running it acceptably.
This applies to Deadly Shadows because like DX:IW, it’s being developed simultaneously for both platforms. Also like Invisible War, it uses a massively retooled and Havok-enhanced Unreal 2.0 engine. While other Unreal 2.0 gamesUnreal 2 and UT2K4 come to mindlook glorious and run fine on the PC, ION Storm’s mods to the engine are obviously focused on maximizing play experience on the Xbox with little if any regard for the needs of PC gamers.
DX:IW, with its massive HUD, claustrophobic periphery, repellent aliasing, and jiggling textures, is designed for optimal viewing from about ten feet awaythat is, from a couch, looking at a relatively low-res display powered by an Xbox.
PC gamers play from no more than eighteen inches away and look at a very high resolution display, and what works on one doesn’t generally work on the other without significant tweaking. ION Storm didn’t do this tweaking for the PC version of Invisible War, and as such released a nauseating abortion of a game for that platform. It is still riddled with bugs (my personal favorite: it refuses to run if your My Documents folder is on a network share) and unplayable by many; I only got it to run at an acceptable level in the last few weeks. It’s a pity, because beneath the patina of crap, Invisible War all 12 frames a second of it on my Athlon 2800+is a terrific game with an engaging story, gorgeous visuals, and a lot of promise for the franchise.
When I asked Randy the rude question above, he told me two things.
First and foremost, he reminded me that studios are often trammeled by the wishes of their publisher, who want games they can sell to the largest possible consumer segments. Given how difficult it can be to return a game in today’s retail environment, there’s little reason for a publisher to wait until it’s done before compelling the developer to release it. It is by no means inconceivable that Eidos forced ION Storm to release Invisible War on both platforms in time for Christmas, regardless of known technical issues.
Eidos has already insisted that Deadly Shadows be more violent, more action oriented, less intensely cerebral, and more forgiving of a nonstealthy approach. According to Randy, the designers responded with a game that supports either play stylea move intended to appease both Eidos brass and lovers of the franchise.
He also said that they are testing it equally on PC and Xbox, and that in his opinion, the PC version of the game wouldn’t be the tragedy that Invisible War was. This, coupled with the fact that much of the original Thief team is involved with Deadly Shadows, implies that its creators will work hard to make the game good. The only variable is the publisher, who might yet force ION Storm’s hand.
So when Randywho because of his willingness to chat with gamers and his long association with the franchise has come to be seen as a sort of Thief messiah in fan circlessaid that he didn’t think we’d see the same complaints about Thief 3 as we did about Invisible War, I didn’t have a hard time believing him.
There’s only one problem.
The Problem
Randy Smith left ION Storm in early April, scant days after my conversation with him at the GDC. His departure came at the same time as another high-profile exit: Harvey Smith (no relation), project director of Invisible War, also split. It’s been all over the industry grapevine. Exits like this are bad, bad press and leave Warren Spector running a studio with no project leads when one game is about to ship and another (Deus Ex 3) is in high concept.
I haven’t asked Randy why he left. Partly because it’s not my business; partly because as a Thief fan I’m not sure I want to hear his answer. The fact is, project directors don’t voluntarily unemploy themselves when a game they’ve worked on for years is literally weeks from release. Project leads who bolt under such circumstances are either forced out or are not happy with the game as it is and unwilling to put their name on it. An official comment from ION Stormthat Randy left because they’re in bug-squashing mode and he’s “not needed” for thatis little more than a press smokescreen.
Whatever the reason, it’s (naturally) resulted in forum discussions of apocalyptic proportions. Randy’s departure has been seen as everything from the ignition of western civilization’s collapse to a sad fact that won’t seriously affect the quality of the game. Forums are a terrible place to look for gospel information, but they do give you the completeand often highly amusingbuffet of human opinion.
Based on some things I saw at the GDC, there is another potential explanation for Randy and Harvey’s sudden exit. Both of them are aggressive supporters of the emergence movement in gameplayemergence being a process by which players can cause reactions not immediately foreseeable based on their predicative actions. Emergence encourages player improvisation and unexpected behavior in approach to game challenges. In fact, both men support emergence to the detriment of linear, developer-driven narrative, on the not-implausible logic that how individual players approach and solve game challenges should drive the game’s story forward. Invisible War is certainly a very emergent game.
Until recently, Warren Spector believed more or less the same thing, but fan reaction to Invisible War seems to have affected him in a very profound way. At a GDC lecture on game narrative, Warren strongly implied that he now sees significant value in carefully implemented developer-driven linearity. The latter technique allows game developers a great deal more control over how the game is experienced but sacrifices some player freedom to accomplish that. The phrase “it didn’t work” escaped Warren’s mouth more than once in connection with Invisible War, and it may be that he has changed his viewpoint to accommodate more developer control over the game structureand, by extension, less emergence.
Both views have strengths and weaknesses, and neither is wrong or right. They are merely different approaches to game making, the equivalent of realism and formalism in cinema. But they are not mutually compatible, and one can imagine the sort of sparks that might fly in a game studio when the boss is questioning a philosophy that his lead designers espouse. It’s possible that these oil-and-water viewpoints just couldn’t coexist any longer.
Invisible War and Randy’s departure notwithstanding, to flatly condemn Deadly Shadows based expressly on rumor and forum chatter would be ill-advised. All fans of the franchise would rather it be a good game than a bad one; barring outlandish success, it is almost certainly the last in the Thief series and by far the most ambitious. Questions of its quality will be answered in a few weeks when it comes out, but uncommitted gamers might want to wait on this one and read some reviews from trusted sources.
Thieves’ Tools
You’re in luck if you missed the Thief series the first time around and want to check it out before Deadly Shadows ships. Thief Gold and The Metal Ageand, to a lesser extent, Thief Platinum and The Dark Projectare all available both at retail and various online sites. If you shop around, there’s a good chance you’ll find any or all of these games for nine bucks or less (check the CompUSA bargain wall) either by themselves or as part of a larger shovelware pack.
Moments like this are when we should all stop what we’re doing and whisper a collective thanks for DirectX. Think what you will of Microsoft, but by forcing an industry-standard gaming API on developers, it all but guaranteed older compliant titles at least some minimal level of compatibility with future operating systems. Thief and its spawn are all DirectX games, and there’s a good chance they’ll work for you out of the box.
If not, you can find a helpful technical FAQ here. Through the Looking Glass is dedicated to preserving the Looking Glass legend and discussing those games and studios it sees as Looking Glass’s creative or spiritual successors. This is a fan site, created and maintained by civilians, so don’t assume that anything posted there is official or condoned. Still, it is a dedicated community of friendly people, and they’ll certainly be happy to welcome new Thief converts into the fold.
The games get a little cranky if you try to install them on NT-based operating systems, including Windows 2000 and XP, because the NT kernel, as Thief sees it, doesn’t support DirectX. The games run fine on these systems, however, and a simple switch will bypass the OS check altogether: just type x:setup.exe lgntforce, where x is your CD-ROM drive, to begin the install routine.
The other major technical gripe people have is that the cutscenes sometimes won’t run, or work at first and then stop. Thief uses the Intel Indeo video codec to control its mission briefings and some game movies; oftentimes this codec isn’t installed or becomes corrupt on modern machines. Check the forum above for instructions on making a .bat file that will solve this problem. If you’re not comfortable with that kind of surgery, post your problem at the forum or get in touch with me by email and we’ll set up a generic copy of the file here.
You might have trouble running Thief without patches, and some of its patches are a little hard to find. Enterprising fans have collected the most important ones and made a few of their own to fix some of the bugs that never got hammered out by Looking Glass. Additionally, since the Dark Engine is kind of long in the tooth these days, graphic snobs may wish to download some fan-made texture packs that hi-resify the meshes and textures in the game. You can find such patches and enhancements here. Thief enjoys a pretty hearty online cult following, so a bit of Googling will usually reveal what you need.
The modding community for Thief has been a busy group, producing a number of user-created levels and episodes. The Thief level editor, DromEd, in addition to being one of the most buggy, obtuse, frustrating, and user-unfriendly creation tools in existence, can be downloaded here or is available on both the Thief Gold and Thief 2 installation discs. If you want to learn more about DromEd and how to be frustrated by it, visit this FAQ. Lots of keen user-created missions, including Episode 1 of “The Circle of Stone and Shadow,” a major fan-built original Thief story of novella proportions, can be found at this site.
The final trouble spot is a trickier one to deal with. Once you get Thief up and running, you might find that the game plays so fast it’s nigh-uncontrollable on a modern PC. The original required only a Pentium-class CPU; today’s gigahertz systems might be as much as fifteen times faster than the base requirements to run the game. If you experience this problem, your best bet is to visit the advanced settings tab in your Windows display dialog and crank all your video card’s special effects up to the maximum. Essentially set your card to run with a level of quality that would make your computer explode if you tried it with a modern game. This usually solves the problem.
It does beg the question, however, whether the Thief games will survive the march of progress. CPUs may hit five gigahertz by the end of this year and will almost surely reach 10 GHz by 2007; even turning up your video settings won’t be enough to throttle a Dark Engine game back down at that point. Serious gamers who want to observe older titles in their natural habitats have to maintain snapshot systems from various milestones in computing history. It’s frustrating and unfair, but there’s no one to blame except Gordon Moore. Still, the thought that Thief may one day be forgotten because technology has charged too far past it is a depressing one.
Stealing Beauty
May 26 will be the swan song of the Thief universe. Whether or not Deadly Shadows is successful, it’s highly unlikely that we’ll see another Thief game. The idea of Garrett toddling off into the silicon sunset is a melancholy one, because in a way it means that the final whisper of Looking Glass Studios will also vanish. The City, with its lush history and superbly crafted environment, the Keepers ever lurking in the shadows, the Hammers with their do-as-I-say moralitythese are but sparks of the true depth and beauty of Thief. The realization that there are at least twenty more pages of material that I’d like to cover is testament to how incomprehensibly vast and towering this achievement truly is. Going on and on about Thief is not dissimilar to waxing poetic about a true love. There is always more to say.
The Thief series transcends mere “game” and has become something that to its devotees is an emotional conduit to manifested dreams. You don’t “play” Thief, you experience it. As Wagner James Au notes, “You must become Garrett … or die.” And so you must: to merely play Thief is to miss some of the tapestry of its richness. If you squirm when it is suggested that computer games can be profound, can be truly meaningful, Thief is probably not for you.
This is the reason that anticipation and dread alike run so high for Deadly Shadows. For those who cherish Thief, those who really got it, describing what it means to them is nearly impossible. There are simply not the words, and the chance that an ill-conceived sequel might diminish that which has been so meaningful is frightening indeed. Only a handful of games reach this point, when players cease to be fans and become disciples. To look at Thief, to experience its symphony of enchantments and subtleties, is to touch the divine future of gaming.
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Nice review Lewis, although I have a couple of questions:
1.) Have Revolution Software set a precedent on the iPhone for adventure games?
2.) Does it come at a handsome price of £1.79?
3.) Does the game include a pain free, PC free installation process?
4.) Am I worth talking to if I don’t own this game?
Many thanks.. 😉
Yes, Yes, Yes and Yes. Oh and no, I’m not bloody talking to you mathew. You still haven’t bought it despite my moaning! Its £1.79!!!!
No internal emails for you tomorrow! and finish Broken Sword!! 🙂
Nice review, Lewis! I’ve been meaning to grab this for months and keep forgetting/getting distracted by other shiny things on my iPhone – like FingerPiano and RockBand – this will be my next download. I promise! 😀
What a great review, Lewis. I remember when the original came out – I was still in college and working at an Electronics Boutique (later to become EBGames). I liked the box art, but was too preoccupied with Arena and Wing Commander 3 to give it a try.
The iPhone/iTouch is going to mean a massive resurgence for adventure games of the classic style. You heard it here first.
God, I was playing the first Broken Sword last November (on my evil WIN98 PC) and got stuck about halfway through. Revolution adventure games are not easy.
I don’t even HAVE an iPhone so I will go back to my corner.
Great review, Lewis!
@ Lewis
That’s good, thanks for answering my questions, although can you please make such issues more obvious in your review next time? I think they’re important questions but readers might miss the two times they’re mentioned there.
Thanks again
😉
I’m confused mat? The opening paragraph is intended to be a snap shot from the article? I wasn’t aware it was a problem? 🙁
@ Mike, I’m currently writing a review for Broken Sword, the Directors Cut, so watch this space 🙂
Hey, for anyone who doesn’t have an iPhone, BASS is available for free on GOG.com.
I’m ashamed to say I had never heard of Beneath a Steel Sky until sighting it there; I was playing more mainstream adventure games at the time of its release. I have played a bit of the game; I rebuilt my snarky robot pal, and all he really seems to do is make fun of this Foster sap. Still, it does look like a classic that I missed, and I should spend some time with it. Maybe when TLJ is done…
Is it the remastered version Xtal? Not that the differences are huge of course! I really would recommend people seek it out, although I can’t promise you’ll find it easy. Be prepared to get stuck at times, like all good adventure games 🙂
@Steerpike: Me and mrlipid briefly spoke about this on your SEGA is Sad Panda article a while ago. I think that the success of the casual gaming scene has brought new demographics into the industry, ones that were perhaps not around when the AG genre was at its peak. As a result these AGs, whether it’s Professor Layton on the DS, Sam and Max on the Wii, Monkey Island on the Xbox or Beneath a Steel Sky on the iPhone/iPod touch, are becoming popular again, and in my book that is a great thing because my mum can be happy once again.
Also, I thought the cover artwork for BASS was amazing as well.
Electronics Boutique was where me and my brother used to go for our games. I remember paying 50 Great British Pounds for Resident Evil 2 there once. And thank god it was once. That was the most I’ve ever payed for a game.
@Lew: I think your sarcasm detector is broken today! Also, the version on GoG will be the free version released by Revolution a few years back. It’s the version I finished at Barlborough.
@Mike: For shame, neither do I. I’d like one just for the games.
@xtal: TLJ! Now I really need to get round to that, I bought it a few months ago on GoG with Sanitarium. Super cheap.
I think that’s enough ‘@’s for today.
@ Lewis
I was very much pulling your plonker, Liza Burnelli! Don’t worry. Lovely review but I just found it amusing that some of the lines from your opening paragraph are exactly the same as some from the last. If intended, not to worry!
@ Gregg
Ooh, I noticed Sanitarium is available on GOG; I’ve contemplated buying it. My memories of the demo I played back so many years ago from a PCG disc are fond ones. To be honest all I remember is a guy named Lenny, and some dude dropping his drawers and falling to his death. I sorely need to revisit good adventure games, as most of my adulthood has been spent playing RPGs and shooters. After the Golden Age/Lucasarts mid-1990s era I pretty much gave up on adventure gaming. I was perverted by the likes of Warcraft, Diablo, and Worms.
xtal, play Sanitarium. You will not be sorry.
Haunted, perhaps, but not sorry.
@ Xtal, be prepared to be perverted by Diablo again when the new one launches 😉 Check out Penumbra, thats technically an adventure game 😉
@ Gregg, £50 for a videogame when we were kids. We must have been bloody mad! I remember the N64 prices being rediculous though, £60+ sometimes. I can’t actually remember the cover art for BASS though. I just remember all the disks.
@ Lewis, Believe you me, I am TOTALLY prepared for Diablo 3 to ruin my life! (much like Diablo 2 did– 10 years ago!!!–)
And re: Penumbra, I think I read a review of it here. Penumbra: Overture, was it? Maybe when my list whittles down; who the hell am I kidding, that will probably never happen.
Off Topic, I can’t wait for Diablo 3 either. We can dungeon together like real geeks! 😀
[…] you’ve read Lewis B’s review of Beneath a Steel Sky you’ll know the two of us have a soft spot for adventure games as well as an inescapable […]
[…] nostalgia that is sure to appeal to fans of both Blade Runner and Beneath a Steel Sky alike. You can view the recently released trailer, among other things, on the game’s […]