Postmortems from Game Developer

Looking Glass'sTHIEF: THE DARK PROJECT

by tom leonard

THIEF: THE DARK PROJECT is one of those games that almost wasn't. During the long struggle to store shelves, the project faced the threat of cancellation twice. A fiscal crisis nearly closed the doors at Looking Glass. During one seven-month span, the producer, project director, lead programmer, lead artist, lead designer and the author of our renderer all left. Worse still, we felt a nagging fear that we might make a game that simply was not fun. But in the end, we shipped a relatively bug-free game that we had fun making, we were proud of, and that we hoped others would enjoy.

The Concept

The THIEF team wanted to create a first-person game that provided a totally different gaming experience, ...