Games I Own: The Thief Series
Posted on 27th Mar 2009 at 15:07 by Joe Martin with 12 comments
First, a confession; I wasn’t going to write about Thief originally. I was actually trying to write a blog post about the gaming achievement I was most proud of, which for me was completing Bookworm in classic mode. In the course of writing that post I started talking about Thief though and before long the game was dominating the post. I love Thief.
I got introduced to Thief back when the first demo came out on a PC Gamer cover disc, though I actually only tried the demo as a matter of curiosity. Even back then the graphics were too ugly to attract my attention straight away.
When I got in to the demo though, which was the entire first level of the game, I was hooked. Not just hooked in the way that I played it three or four times either; I was physically addicted. I’m confident that, if someone put a gun to my head, I could play that level with my eyes shut. Lord Bafford’s Manor was permanently etched onto my brain with the kind of furious heat that only comes from eyes that burn from staring at a screen so long.
Nor was I the only person in my family that was hooked either; on a whim I introduced my Dad to the demo and sure enough he liked it to. That was something that was almost without precedent as, although we had played game on the Amiga together years before, we hadn’t really shared an interest to that degree in a while.
My Dad's birthday was conveniently coming up, so I bought the game for him and he seemed to like it. I say ‘seem to’ because he only ever played the game after I was in bed and it took me a few days to learn that he’d played it at all. In that period I had fallen out with the game, as the zombies in the second level were just too scary to overcome, so it seemed to come from out of the blue when my Dad mentioned that he was still playing it.
What followed next was an unusual, but important event in my life. I was unable to play the game, but I wanted to know all about it – so I asked my Dad, every day. Each morning, each meal time, each car journey became a ritual as I asked what had happened in Thief last night. My Dad wouldn’t always finish a level in a night, so he’d spin the story out in greater detail; the Burricks in the tunnels, the scraps of parchment in the Lost City, the sarcastic comments Garrett made as he stole. The first time I played Thief I did it by proxy, and I loved it so much we repeated the process with the second game.
Eventually I mustered the courage to go back and play Thief and Thief II myself, forearmed with these detailed descriptions. I wasn’t disappointed. Thief is a game that lets players set their own pace and tactics, planning different strategies and routes, so I was able to get just enough from the game that was new to still be fascinated. My Dad had played the game on the hardest difficulty and wouldn’t leave a level until he had completed everything, slowly, delicately. I adopted a more ruthless system of incapacitating (but never killing) all the enemies I could. Playing it that way felt like falling in love with an old friend and learning to see them in a new way.
Thief met with a mixed reaction and, though it spawned two sequels and sold pretty well, it’s now often overlooked by the critics. For shame. If you can look past the dated graphics and are at all interested in new, interesting game types then you definitely need to take a look at the Thief series - even if you only look at the lesser third game, Deadly Shadows. It may require a tiny bit of Googling to get it working on a modern system, but the incredible story, atmosphere and style will pay you back in spades.
And if you decide that you aren’t going to play it then you can at least tell me what your greatest gaming achievement is, just so I don’t feel like I’ve gone utterly off-topic.
Random Fact: According to RPS the third game, Thief: Deadly Shadows featured the vocal talents of none other than Lily Allen, the singer. Before breaking into the music biz she was cast by Eidos as ‘Townspeople #1’ – the phrasing of which is awful in how politically correct it is.
Number of Times Completed: Twice for the first one, once for the second two.
I got introduced to Thief back when the first demo came out on a PC Gamer cover disc, though I actually only tried the demo as a matter of curiosity. Even back then the graphics were too ugly to attract my attention straight away.
When I got in to the demo though, which was the entire first level of the game, I was hooked. Not just hooked in the way that I played it three or four times either; I was physically addicted. I’m confident that, if someone put a gun to my head, I could play that level with my eyes shut. Lord Bafford’s Manor was permanently etched onto my brain with the kind of furious heat that only comes from eyes that burn from staring at a screen so long.
Nor was I the only person in my family that was hooked either; on a whim I introduced my Dad to the demo and sure enough he liked it to. That was something that was almost without precedent as, although we had played game on the Amiga together years before, we hadn’t really shared an interest to that degree in a while.
My Dad's birthday was conveniently coming up, so I bought the game for him and he seemed to like it. I say ‘seem to’ because he only ever played the game after I was in bed and it took me a few days to learn that he’d played it at all. In that period I had fallen out with the game, as the zombies in the second level were just too scary to overcome, so it seemed to come from out of the blue when my Dad mentioned that he was still playing it.
What followed next was an unusual, but important event in my life. I was unable to play the game, but I wanted to know all about it – so I asked my Dad, every day. Each morning, each meal time, each car journey became a ritual as I asked what had happened in Thief last night. My Dad wouldn’t always finish a level in a night, so he’d spin the story out in greater detail; the Burricks in the tunnels, the scraps of parchment in the Lost City, the sarcastic comments Garrett made as he stole. The first time I played Thief I did it by proxy, and I loved it so much we repeated the process with the second game.
Eventually I mustered the courage to go back and play Thief and Thief II myself, forearmed with these detailed descriptions. I wasn’t disappointed. Thief is a game that lets players set their own pace and tactics, planning different strategies and routes, so I was able to get just enough from the game that was new to still be fascinated. My Dad had played the game on the hardest difficulty and wouldn’t leave a level until he had completed everything, slowly, delicately. I adopted a more ruthless system of incapacitating (but never killing) all the enemies I could. Playing it that way felt like falling in love with an old friend and learning to see them in a new way.
Thief met with a mixed reaction and, though it spawned two sequels and sold pretty well, it’s now often overlooked by the critics. For shame. If you can look past the dated graphics and are at all interested in new, interesting game types then you definitely need to take a look at the Thief series - even if you only look at the lesser third game, Deadly Shadows. It may require a tiny bit of Googling to get it working on a modern system, but the incredible story, atmosphere and style will pay you back in spades.
And if you decide that you aren’t going to play it then you can at least tell me what your greatest gaming achievement is, just so I don’t feel like I’ve gone utterly off-topic.
Random Fact: According to RPS the third game, Thief: Deadly Shadows featured the vocal talents of none other than Lily Allen, the singer. Before breaking into the music biz she was cast by Eidos as ‘Townspeople #1’ – the phrasing of which is awful in how politically correct it is.
Number of Times Completed: Twice for the first one, once for the second two.
12 Comments
Discuss in the forums ReplyRandom fact 2: Isn't the Thief level Return to the Cathedral supposed to be one of the scariest ever or something?
There are two levels which often get awarded that honor; Return to The Cathedral from Thief 1 and The Cradle from the third game.
Return is a level which sees Garrett venturing into a sealed off part of the city to get into a haunted cathedral and steal a cursed gem called The Eye, which is constantly teasing and taunting him as he scrambles over rubble and past the undead, invulnerable keepers.
The Cradle is a similar set-up. It's an old, haunted orphanage and you go in looking for info. As you go through you uncover more and more of the history of the building - which was also an insane asylum at one point. Then you put together the idea that it was both an asylum and an orphanage at the same time.
I've literally seen dissertations written on how well designed both levels are and how they use sound and visual clues in such a clever, chilling way.
On your special request, my greatest gaming achievement was in Destruction Derby 1 on the PS1. For those of you that know the game, in Race mode, i was able to push The Skum to 5th division and L-driver to 1st division while still winning 1st division, using the medium car.
... then i got a life.
I remember playing it a long while ago, but not getting far, I guess I was too impatient back then, I probably tried to play it like a shooter. Perhaps I should go back and give them another go.
Weird - I could play through the Ravenholm level in HL2, the spooky bits of STALKER and the Dunwich Building in Fallout 3 but the 2nd level of the original Thief really freaked me out at the time. I think it was because I couldn't kill the Zombies and I just found it very unsettling.