Camelotstuff, A, we were having infinite challenges trying to convince anyone it was
marketable, and B, the missions that we had the best definition on and the best detail on
were all the breaking into Camelot, meeting up with someone, getting a clue, stealing
something, whatever. As we did more work in that direction, and those continued to be
the missions that we could explain best to other people, it just started going that way.
With the faction thing we never got whatever we needed to actually make time to make
a prototype. The thing about that is it requires a lot of play mechanics until it starts
working, whereas the basic stealth model was something you could kind of get the basic
idea of by having the guard looking the other way and you going past pretty quickly. So
Paul had been pushing for a while that the thief side of it was the really interesting part
and why not you just do a thief game. And as things got more chaotic and more stuff was
going on and we were having more issues with how to market the stuff, we just kept
focusing in on the thief part. We went through a bunch of different phases of reorganiz-
ing the project structure and a bunch of us got sucked on to doing some other project
work onFlightand stuff, and there was all this chaos. We said, “OK, well, we’ve got to
get this going and really focus and make a plan.” So we put Greg [LoPiccolo] in charge
of the project and we agreed we were going to call itThiefand we were going to focus
much more. That’s when we went from lots of playing around and exploring to “Let’s
make this thief game.”
It seems like at the time there were not a lot of other stealth games.
Not that we knew of, at least. Right before we shipped,Tenchucame out in Japan, and I
think it came out in the States shortly thereafter. So we certainly looked atTenchu
when it came out, but by that point our game was mostly done other than tuning, and
they were much more an action-y arcade game. They were a lot more about killing peo-
ple in cool ninja ways.Tenchuwas a cool game, but it was a different focus than our
game.
It’s interesting to me that you consideredThiefthe more bankable game con-
cept, even though its game mechanics were in a lot of ways totally new and
original.
I think it was more that we believed in it. I mean, Eidos never really believed in it and
until the end told us to put more monsters in the levels and have more fighting and
exploring and less stealth and I’m not sure there was ever a point they got it. I mean,
the trailers Eidos did forThiefwere all scenes with people shooting fire arrows at peo-
ple charging them. So you can derive from that how well they understood or believed in
the idea.
Yet they still funded it...
Certainly. If they hadn’t done that, we wouldn’t have done the game. So very thankful
for that. I’m not sure we ever got to a point where they said, “Oh yeah, this is gonna
work.” I think they at least had “OK, we’re selling this anti-hero cynical thief guy,
maybe we can do that,” in a way that selling reverse Camelot or whatever was just not
appealing to anyone.
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