| Stealing
Beauty: A Thief Retrospective
By Steerpike
May 2004
—Continued
from Part 1—
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 Levine—who created
the original game concept—were 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 Garrett—and about nine million other
tiny roles in the Thief games—and 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 it—but 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 closure—in 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 2—Serpent Isle and The
Silver Seed and served as associate producer of Wing Commander,
Privateer, Martian Dreams, and Ultima 6, among others—all
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
Eidos—Thief's publisher—got 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 classic—so 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 1996—when Thief was just a zygote—the company
went on a shopping frenzy. It was looking for a trophy studio—some
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 vicious—but accurate—Dallas 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 Garrett—in
a revelation sure to infuriate him—figures 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 thief—picking 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 Havok—which most gamers first saw in Max
Payne 2—it 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 questions—rude and otherwise—with 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 afterthought—an 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 games—Unreal 2 and UT2K4
come to mind—look 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 away—that 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 style—a 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 Randy—who 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 circles—said 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
Storm—that Randy left because they're in bug-squashing mode and
he's "not needed" for that—is 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 complete—and often highly amusing—buffet 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 gameplay—emergence
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 structure—and,
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 Age—and, to a lesser extent,
Thief Platinum and The Dark Project—are 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 morality—these 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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forum to discuss this game—
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