Whaat, I started replaying the game literally a few days ago, and now I see this on HN! The graphics and obviously didn't age well, although there are some higher res texture packs, which help when you play it in 4k.
The gameplay is okay-ish, probably due to nostalgia, but the AI is not the smartest, which creates a lot of fun situations - two guards trying to hit a giant spider inside a locked prison cell with swords, hitting only the cell door, instead of pressing a button next to them to open it, while calling the spider by name of the protagonist. But I remember that it was one of the scariest games for me as a kid, when it suddenly turned into dark fantasy horror from "just a thief game". I really had to push myself to walk past some of the undead and absolutely needed to make sure I cleaned the level thoroughly to be able to walk around comfortably.
The world building, sound design (especially the ambient sound loops) and the aesthetics/general visual style is something really unique that keeps drawing me to this game and it's really telling by how well I remember some of the places, despite having not played the game for 10 years or so.
To Thief heads who played I and II and want more of it: play The Black Parade, an enormous mod 7 years in the making that is actually an entire new game.
From what I've heard The Black Parade mission style hews close to the style of Thief: The Dark Project. If your tastes are closer to Thief II: The Metal Age (or you'd just like more taffing about), I enjoyed T2X: Shadows of the Metal Age[1] quite a bit. The voice acting was pretty rough in places, but I found that kinda charming. I've also heard good things about Death's Cold Embrace[2].
Also worth mentioning for Thief fans: The Dark Mod started as a Doom 3 mod, but now is a completely standalone, free and open source game: https://www.thedarkmod.com/main/
Hundreds of missions, an amazing Radiant fork maintained by the team, as well as an active and passionate community. They are awesome.
People talk about the graphics, but it was the crescendo and decrescendo of guard sounds/singing/footsteps in Thief that made it one of the most immersive games I’ve ever played.
Yeah, the graphics were honestly kinda underwhelming, in particular the models were behind the curve compared to contemporary titles like Half-Life, and this didn't really improve with later titles like System Shock 2, where half the horror was the distorted textures stretched across the faces of the models.
I think what modern games have lost, that some of these late 90s titles absolutely nailed (Thief in particular), is the sound design and ambiance, which is just so dang evocative. Even the smallest incidental sounds had so much character. Picking up an item, pulling a lever, footsteps on the floor.
Modern games use such flat sounds for everything. Sure it's more realistic, at the cost of character and vibe.
Never played Thief, but I logged a lot of hours in Unreal, 1998. I was (and still am) amazed at how full-featured the software renderer was. I always wished I could peek at the code behind it.
If memory serves, the only thing my 3dfx Voodoo3 could do that software-only mode could not was surface reflections. Maybe something with colored lighting too, it's been a long time. Point is, it was a decent enough substitute for dedicated graphics hardware.
I was too young to understand but I distinctly remember the 3Dfx version looking vastly better everywhere to my eyes. Reflections were amazing though. Could have been the higher resolution, or could have been the fact that I was playing on an older CPU at home at the time. I was jealous of the people with hardware acceleration.
Did unreal have 16-bit color software rendering? Most software renderers back then that I recall only did 8-bit color and ran choppier than the 3D accelerated renderers on the hardware at the time. This made a pretty big difference especially with lighting in my experience.
But I remember Unreal being unreachable for me at that time because I couldn't even dream of getting a graphics accelerator and it won't even start with out a one, or was it the sound card requirement that was the blocker?
Everything up to (and including) Unreal Tournament had software rendering. It was one of the selling points when its competitor (Quake 3) was Hardware-accelerated-only.
I think it was the graphics card. I remember getting a paper route and waking up at 5am every morning to save up the money for my Voodoo card. Was absolutely mind blowing as a 13 year old.
The guys in OldUnreal have access to the source code AFAIRemember. Epic gave them the source code so they can produce those patches. They also improved the UT99 engine I think.
For reference, the surface cache referred to in the article is similar to the one in Quake. Basically, you have a bunch of regular textures that you want to use when rasterizing your polygons. On top of that you want to blend low resolution lightmaps. These lightmaps need filtering (typically bilinear) to appear smooth when blended on top of the original texture.
It's wasteful to do this expensive filtering and blending every frame since the player typically sees those blended textures for a large number of frames when they're traversing the environment, so you keep a LRU cache of blended textures around. That's the surface cache.
and "the Digital Antiquarian" just did a great, deep two-parter on the history of Looking Glass last autumn. (covers Thief, Thief 2, System Shock, and some forgotten oddities)
I'd love to see a modern interpretation of Terra Nova or Heavy Gear. There are few games about infantry equipped with powered battle suits and heavy weaponry, which I find sort of odd given how cool the concept is.
It's interesting to see parallel development of certain features in the early 3D era and how they were used. The original Prey by 3D Realms was shown in demos in 1997/98 with portal tech including rotating it in a level prop, so it's interesting and ties into the game fiction instead of being only functional to stitch map areas together. There's likely more examples during that period when licensing an engine was less common.
In 1999/2000 I worked on my own Thief levels using the dromed editor - it was both really fun to work with, and utterly frustrating - in a time before open source engines - there were so many small annoying bugs in the editor that would cause it to crash, so you SAVED often and even learned to version files as it was easy to screw up.
But the geometry that could be created was stunning - from courtyards to cathedrals, levels allowed clever use of light and shadow.
The gameplay is okay-ish, probably due to nostalgia, but the AI is not the smartest, which creates a lot of fun situations - two guards trying to hit a giant spider inside a locked prison cell with swords, hitting only the cell door, instead of pressing a button next to them to open it, while calling the spider by name of the protagonist. But I remember that it was one of the scariest games for me as a kid, when it suddenly turned into dark fantasy horror from "just a thief game". I really had to push myself to walk past some of the undead and absolutely needed to make sure I cleaned the level thoroughly to be able to walk around comfortably.
The world building, sound design (especially the ambient sound loops) and the aesthetics/general visual style is something really unique that keeps drawing me to this game and it's really telling by how well I remember some of the places, despite having not played the game for 10 years or so.
New gigantic maps full of secrets, style faithful to the original, weird universe, new story with cutscenes and voice acting. https://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=152429
I am not affiliated, just a fan.
[1] https://www.thief2x.com/
[2] https://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=148371
Hundreds of missions, an amazing Radiant fork maintained by the team, as well as an active and passionate community. They are awesome.
I think what modern games have lost, that some of these late 90s titles absolutely nailed (Thief in particular), is the sound design and ambiance, which is just so dang evocative. Even the smallest incidental sounds had so much character. Picking up an item, pulling a lever, footsteps on the floor.
Modern games use such flat sounds for everything. Sure it's more realistic, at the cost of character and vibe.
If memory serves, the only thing my 3dfx Voodoo3 could do that software-only mode could not was surface reflections. Maybe something with colored lighting too, it's been a long time. Point is, it was a decent enough substitute for dedicated graphics hardware.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npMujOQsjGQ
It's wasteful to do this expensive filtering and blending every frame since the player typically sees those blended textures for a large number of frames when they're traversing the environment, so you keep a LRU cache of blended textures around. That's the surface cache.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T1tXepGXDDM
https://www.filfre.net/2025/10/a-looking-glass-half-empty-pa...
Also I suppose almost the entire Halo franchise was always about that.
But the geometry that could be created was stunning - from courtyards to cathedrals, levels allowed clever use of light and shadow.