“A game where the enemies are to be avoided and where the only bloodshed is usually that of your character — can Looking Glass be serious?” That was Edge’s opening question when it reviewed Thief: The Dark Project in January 1999. In a year of first-person shooters, Looking Glass Studios had made a first-person game in which fighting was usually a mistake. The player is Garrett, a professional burglar in a gloomy city of magic and 19th-century machinery, and his tools are shadows, silence and patience. Edge decided the studio was serious: the game “manages to create a whole new spin on an overly familiar genre”.
Fast facts
- Developer: Looking Glass Studios, Massachusetts.
- Publisher: Eidos Interactive.
- Released: December 1998, for Windows PCs.
- Price: £40 according to Edge, £44.99 according to PC Zone; $49.99 in the United States.
- Project director: Greg LoPiccolo.
- Engine: Looking Glass’s own, later known as the Dark engine, which System Shock 2 also used.
- Sequels: Thief Gold (1999), Thief II: The Metal Age (2000), Thief: Deadly Shadows (2004) and the reboot Thief (2014).
From Quake rival to burglary game
When Edge first visited in early 1997, The Dark Project looked like one more game in the wake of Quake: a first-person game with polygon enemies, a medieval setting and “volumetric rendering, with ray-cast lighting”. The project director, Greg LoPiccolo, told the magazine that the comparison ended there. “In essence you’re a thief in this undefined medieval age, sort of medieval meets ‘Brazil’ meets ‘City of Lost Children’,” he said, with “some electricity, some magic, and some 19th century machinery kind of stuff”. Already, he said, “much of the actual gameplay involves using shadows effectively. You’re constantly sneaking around and making decisions: who to kill, who to sneak past, and who to trick.”
“Essentially we’re building a type of simulator,” LoPiccolo said, “where object interactions are correct and physics are tied in correctly”. Looking Glass called its system for giving objects real-world properties Act-React. “Things that should burn will burn,” the lead designer at the time, Jeff Yaus, explained, “and then it’s up to the player to decide to burn things, whether or not we’ve anticipated it.” Looking Glass had made Ultima Underworld and System Shock, and in 1998 Maximum PC grouped Thief with Ion Storm’s Deus Ex as two games that would carry System Shock’s ideas forward. The magazine pointed out that the people behind them, Doug Church and Warren Spector, had been “two of the central talents involved in System Shock”.
Light and sound
The game turns darkness and noise into things the player can read. A gem at the bottom of the screen shows how visible Garrett is. Edge listed what affected it: the light in the area, how close he stands to a wall, how fast he is moving, and even whether he has a weapon drawn. Surfaces matter to the ear as well as the eye. Walking on metal gratings or opening a door can give Garrett away, and a moss arrow can lay a silent carpet over a noisy floor.
The guards are built to listen. They shout into the dark if they hear something, investigate, and call for help if they find an intruder. Bodies left in the open raise the alarm, so the player learns to carry unconscious guards into dark corners. PC Zone’s Paul Presley found the tension of crouching in a dark corner as a guard walks past, or dropping a plate on a stone floor and hearing “someone in the room next door say ‘Did you hear something?’”, “almost unbearable”. The same sounds work for the player: footsteps, whistling and conversations tell Garrett where the guards are.
Garrett’s equipment is mostly for avoiding a fight. His blackjack knocks a guard out from behind. His bow fires broadhead arrows that kill, but also water arrows that put out torches, moss arrows that carpet a noisy floor, rope arrows to climb to a ledge, noisemaker arrows to draw a guard away, and gas arrows that knock guards out. Flash bombs, mines and a sword complete the kit. The difficulty levels change the job rather than adding enemies: Computer Gaming World found that where a mission on normal asked for a magic sword and 1,000 gold, on expert it asked for 2,000 gold and no killing.
Reviews
PC Zone gave Thief 90 per cent in January 1999. Presley’s verdict was “very, very enjoyable, if somewhat clichéd”: he praised its “excellent movement and audio engines” and said the ordinary burglaries were “some of the most well-designed and absorbingly playable levels ever encountered in a first-person game”. He disliked how often the story turned to zombies and other undead, which reduced parts of it to “standard hack ‘n’ slash”, and wished for a multiplayer mode.
Edge thought no other developer could evoke “such a sense of place” and credited Thief with stealth elements that “outdo those of Metal Gear Solid”, Konami’s stealth game of the same year. It noted a “slightly dated 3D engine” and a limited number of enemy types. Computer Gaming World’s review, by Lance A. Larka, was headlined “Thief Slips Into the Shadows for One of the Freshest Experiences in Gaming”. He praised the sound and the variable difficulty, but found some areas so dark that he had to turn the brightness up to see anything.
Sequels
Looking Glass reused the engine for System Shock 2 (1999), and in 1999 Eidos released Thief Gold, the original game with “three treacherous new missions”. Thief II: The Metal Age followed in 2000. Garrett’s city has a new, corrupt sheriff, with a power called the Mechanists behind him, and PC Zone noted with relief that the zombies were largely gone; it gave the sequel 90 per cent.
Thief II was Looking Glass’s last game. The studio closed in 2000, and its designer Randy Smith wrote that there was “a low chance that Thief 3 will ever see the light of day”. It did. Smith and Terri Brosius had begun designing it early in 2000, and when the project moved to Ion Storm’s Austin studio, Smith became its project director and Brosius its lead writer. Thief: Deadly Shadows came out in 2004 for PC and Xbox. It added a third-person view and a city to explore between missions, and Edge gave it seven out of ten. Computer Gaming World’s Johnny Liu admired its lighting and third-person camera, but thought it had been “rushed out the castle door”. Eidos closed Ion Storm Austin early in 2005.
After Square Enix bought Eidos, its Canadian studio Eidos Montreal made a new Thief, released in February 2014 for PC and the PlayStation and Xbox consoles. Edge’s preview presented it as a chance to introduce fans of Dishonored to “the genre’s originator”. Its reviews were mixed. In 2022 the Thief name passed, with Eidos Montreal, to the Swedish group Embracer.
Sources
- Edge issue 43, March 1997, pp. 43–44: preview of The Dark Project (Looking Glass near Harvard and MIT; Greg LoPiccolo as project director and Jeff Yaus as lead designer; Act-React; the quotations).
- PC Zone issue 66, August 1998, p. 26: System Shock 2 “based around the Looking Glass Dark engine”.
- Maximum PC, December 1998, p. 51: Thief and Deus Ex, Doug Church and Warren Spector.
- Computer Gaming World issue 173, December 1998, p. 116: “The Holiday Hot 100” ($49.99, Eidos Interactive).
- PC Gamer (UK) issue 63, December 1998: Eidos advertisement for Thief: The Dark Project (© Looking Glass Studios; Eidos Interactive).
- Edge issue 67, January 1999, p. 89: review (Eidos, Looking Glass Studios, £40; the light gem and what affects it; noise and guards; the arrows; Metal Gear Solid; the quotations).
- PC Zone issue 72, January 1999, pp. 96–98: review by Paul Presley (£44.99, Eidos Interactive; the equipment; the quotations). The 90 per cent score is given in later issues’ references to the review, for example PC Zone issue 76, May 1999.
- Computer Gaming World issue 176, March 1999, pp. 142–143: review by Lance A. Larka (the light jewel, bodies and alarms, the difficulty levels, the equipment, the darkness; the headline).
- Computer Gaming World issue 183, October 1999, p. 41: Thief Gold advertisement (the quotation).
- PC Zone issue 88, April 2000, pp. 68–71: Thief II: The Metal Age review by Paul Presley (Eidos; the sheriff and the Mechanists; the zombies gone). PC Zone issue 91, July 2000: Thief 2 listed at 90 per cent.
- PC Zone issue 92, August 2000, p. 16: “Award-winning developer of Thief II closes down” (Looking Glass’s closure; Randy Smith’s letter and the quotation).
- Edge issue 136, May 2004, pp. 43–45: Thief: Deadly Shadows preview and interview with Randy Smith (Thief 3 begun at Looking Glass early in 2000 by Smith and Terri Brosius; their roles at Ion Storm; the third-person view and the city).
- Edge issue 139, August 2004, p. 15: review scores (Thief: Deadly Shadows, PC and Xbox, Eidos, Ion Storm, seven).
- Computer Gaming World issue 242, September 2004: Thief: Deadly Shadows review by Johnny Liu (the quotation).
- Electronic Gaming Monthly issue 191, May 2005, p. 61: Eidos closes Ion Storm.
- Edge issue 263, February 2014, p. 44: preview of Thief (Square Enix, Eidos Montreal; PC and consoles; February release; the quotation).
- “Thief (2014 video game)”, Wikipedia (web, secondary): release on 25 February 2014; “mixed or average” reviews according to Metacritic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thief_(2014_video_game)
- Embracer Group, “Embracer Group enters into an agreement to acquire Eidos, Crystal Dynamics, and Square Enix Montréal amongst other assets”, May 2022 (web, secondary): https://www.embracer.com/releases/embracer-group-enters-into-an-agreement-to-acquire-eidos-crystal-dynamics-and-square-enix-montreal-amongst-other-assets/