A Damn Fine Cup of Culture

One of the things that video games can do magnificently is create worlds. These posts are an occasional exploration of games that I love because of where they take me.

Like most people who’ve been playing video games for a long, long time, I like a good first-person shooter. I still remember the excitement of playing Wolfenstein 3D, and then later Doom and Quake. There were 3D environments before these, but they popularised them, while also driving the hardware evolution that, some 30-odd years later, would see graphics cards that do real-time raytracing. (If you have no idea what any of this means, don’t worry: it’s not what the post will be about.)

But while it’s fun to run around a 3D environment wielding a gun and shooting baddies, those aren’t my favourite first-person games. Give me a choice between running around, guns blazing, enemies falling left, right and centre, and sneaking around in shadows and biding my time, and it’s usually the latter that appeals most.

And while there are great stealth games such as Metal Gear Solid and Splinter Cell, my first proper stealth experience, and still my favourite one in many ways, was Thief. I didn’t start with the first game in the series (subtitled The Dark Project) but with the sequel Thief: The Metal Age, and more precisely, with the one-level demo that came out in 1999.

Truth be told: I bounced off of the Thief 2 demo at the time. I was used to running around in more simplistic levels where my only tasks were to kill, not be killed and find the exit. In Thief, you could kill patrolling guards with your bow and arrows or your sword, but this was less easy than the point-and-click death-dealing of shooters at the time. More importantly, though, as a master thief you were good at sneaking, but you weren’t necessarily equally masterful at fighting off half a dozen guards that have become aware of you because you chose to murder your way through the mansion you’ve broken into. The shadows were your allies, and a true master thief would sneak past those guards, perhaps knock them out with his blackjack when a guard’s patrol would take him to a secluded corridor, and then you’d drag the unconscious body to some place where it wouldn’t be found. Playing Thief was nothing less than a paradigm shift at the time, and it took me and my brain a while before I understood the game’s systems, which were more complex and interlinked than those of the shooters of the day. How fast can I move before I’m heard? How far away would I have to be from a guardsman to risk crossing a well-lit courtyard? If discovered, where could I hide, and how long would it take for them to stop looking for me, muttering to themselves, “It musta been a rat…”? A rat, mind you, that had knocked out half of them and stolen several choice trinkets that their master was exceedingly fond of.

An environment in a stealth game may be topographically identical to that in a shooter (though well-designed game environments will obviously keep in mind the kind of game that is set in that environment), but the player’s experience of that environment will be entirely different. Being slow, pressing against walls, keeping to the corners and the shadows: these make for something much more intimate. Walls and corners are cover in a shooter, but your focus is always on your enemies. In Thief specifically, obviously you’re trying to keep an eye on guards and others that might discover you and raise an alarm – but you’re just as aware of materials. The floor here is wooden, it may creak, but other than that it’s not particularly loud. Over there, though, where you’re crossing a metal grate? That’s loud. Is there an alternative? Might you be able to climb the furniture and get to the rafters, so you can cross a room above the heads of whoever might otherwise spot you? Likewise, your relationship to whatever other characters are put in that space with you is also more intimate: in a shooter, you try to kill them because otherwise they’ll kill you, but in a game such as Thief, you might crouch in the shadows while a guard slowly walks past you, just inches away, muttering about how badly he is paid or how he’s glad he’s no longer on duty in the wine cellar, where it’s damp and there are rats and spiders. Some players will indeed try to play a game like Thief in a self-imposed ‘ghost mode’, where they won’t kill or even knock out anyone, so they constantly share the space they’re invading with others who aren’t even aware they’re there. Try that with a big effing gun!

So why am I writing about Thief in mid-2024, a quarter of a century after the game first came out? The reason is this: last last year, to celebrate a quarter-century of Thief: The Dark Project, a group of fans (including a number of professional game developers) released a fan campaign for the game. This campaign, Thief: The Black Parade, was in development for seven years, and with ten missions it is similar in length to the original games. Other than many Thief fans of old, I only played it over the last few weeks. Much like my first experience of the Thief 2 demo back in 1999, it took me a while to get into the game: decades of other games had rewired my brain and made me forget exactly how Thief works and feels. How can I move so that I’m not heard, or so that the guards hear me briefly but then conclude it was (what else?) those damn rats? Should I douse those torches to create more shadows, or do I keep my water arrows for later, when they might come in more handy? Do I let the servants slaving away in the castle kitchen be, or are they a risk, so I’d best lure them away from the well-lit kitchen, knock them out and stash their unconscious bodies away in the pantry?

In some ways, The Black Parade feels like a best-of tape, in that its ten missions resemble those of the original Thief: you explore (and ransack) mansions, monasteries, crypts and ruins, you hide from guards and mages and strange, deformed creatures and from the undead. The City is filled with intrigue and magic and nascent technology that seems just as magical. But computers in the 2020s are so much more powerful than the PCs we were playing games on in the late 20^th century, and fan patches have made the Thief engine more capable than it was originally, so while the City of The Black Parade is still moodily lo-fi (there is an abstraction to its low-poly environments and characters that takes some getting used to but that is fascinatingly evocative) as Thief: The Dark Project‘s City was, it is bigger and more labyrinthine and varied. It’s the City as it looks and feels in my memory, not as it was in Thief and even Thief 2. In many ways, The Black Parade is the Thief that we recollect, an amalgam of the actual game and our imagination, with the many gaps filled in. The Black Parade is a love letter to the best, most immersive stealth games ever made, and you can get lost in its shadows for dozens of hours.

Once I finished The Black Parade, filled with admiration for the artistry that went into creating this amazing game, I looked at the many more modern unplayed games on my hard disk, several dozen icons trying to guilt-trip me into clicking them: play me! No, play me! And then I saw an icon to the side of the screen and remembered that a couple of years ago I’d reinstalled the original Thief games – but I didn’t play them for very long, because these are games that can’t just be launched for a quick ten, fifteen minutes. Crouching in the shadows and waiting to figure out the guards’ patrol paths takes time. Stealth takes time. But falling, and falling hard, for the Thief experience all over again thanks to an amazing labour of love made it easy for me to resist all of those newer, fancier, glossier games. Sorry, modern games, for the next few weeks you’ll find me in the City, dousing torches, grabbing golden vases, laughing quietly at the guards who pass me without ever knowing that I’m there. For the time being, my power fantasy is that of crouching in the shadows, unnoticed, like the master thief I want to be.

Author’s note: Our friend and frequent podcast guest Dan Thron (of Martini Giant fame) not only worked on the original Thief games, as an artist and voice actor, he also contributed to Thief: The Black Parade. You can check out his ultra-stylish fan film Thief – Cutscene Zero here.