Remembering Thief, on Thief II's 20th anniversary

Fans of the Thief series celebrated the 20th anniversary of Thief II: The Metal Age, which is probably the best of the 3 games. It had significant improvements from Looking Glass in features, and had a more focused development in overall.

Gvmers channel on youtube did a documentary about Looking Glass and the "Rise and Fall of Thief", which goes through early development, what happened to the devs and what made the 2014 Thief game such a disappointment. I think we can all agree on it, that the last effort, which happened 6 years ago, made sure that there won't be another Thief game for another 5-8 years. Unless somebody buys the rights for the game itself, which I am sure Eidos don't want to sell, or at least not for cheap.

I didn't know about Gvmers, but the quality of this documentary made me a fan of them. What I especially loved is that they show young people that all of the games you like, Bioshock, Prey, Dishonored, System Shock, comes from one game and one of the most talented people in game development history.

Techraptor writer, Trevor Whalen also did a nice article about 20 Years of Thief II Fan Missions, which goes through the history of Thief collaborators, who made sure the game is kept alive through fan missions. The community is active to this day (in fact they just did a 20th anniversary mission contest), probably one of the oldest one in gaming history. Since the games are still running well on modern hardware and OSes, they made sure that Thief is in our active memory.

I just played the first mission of T2X - a full fan made campaign with 13 missions, with voiceovers, cinematics, etc. - this week, and even the first mission showed amazing promise, I was blowned away of the details of everything.

The article definitely worth the read, it even mentions The Dark Mod, which is a standalone game based on idtech 4 engine (used in Doom 3 and Quake 4), and very much a modernized version of Thief, that's a better Thief than the 2014 version. It has an editor and many fan missions too.

Thief is here to stay for the joy of stealth gaming fans.