Everyone loves a bit of stealth in their games. Unless it's one of those games where it's about as welcome or necessary as the career of Bruno Mars but they cram it in anyway. Here we celebrate a game that established lurking and blagging as a true art form, and one arguably still unsurpassed.
Stealth in games barely even existed until 1998, when Tenchu: Stealth Assassins, Metal Gear Solid and Thief: The Dark Project all surfaced at once to make skulking the coolest gig in town.
Thief, purest of the stealth-'em-ups, was born at Looking Glass Studios - a developer super-group with the likes of Ken Levine (BioShock), Doug Church (System Shock) and Warren Spector (Deus Ex) all on board. As with many revolutionary projects, it had its troubles. Maturing from subversive swordplay sim Dark Camelot into the very different Thief amidst publisher pressure, layoffs and constant near-closure - you have to take your jaunty mugger's hat off to the team for seeing it through at all, let alone with such swaggeringly confident results.
When Thief finally broke cover, all those players tired of first-person alien disembowelment dimmed the lights and sank deep into the patient, brooding world of master thief Garrett. With this new, entertainingly cynical antihero, they found that head-on confrontation was a Bad Thing. Silence and shadows were suddenly crucial, noise and visibility a death sentence.
Missions required the player to plan an approach, meet objectives with or without improvisation and slip back out alive, ideally with no one any the wiser and Garrett's pockets weighed down to his ankles with loot. With a quiver full of unlikely arrow types he was far from helpless, but they came in handier for distracting guards, securing ropes and dousing lights; up close, the old blackjack to the back of the skull was a slippery taffer's best friend.
All this took place within The City, a bewitching metropolis of magic and electricity, slang and pomposity, zealous Hammerites, primal Pagans and secretive Keepers. Odd mobs of zombies, spirits and wacky beastmen too, but the supernatural gave way to a stronger focus on Garrett's profession in Thief II: The Metal Age as the team's confidence solidified.
The legacy
Notable among stealth's late adopters in the years following Thief were Splinter Cell, Hitman and Assassin's Creed, with Arkane's Dishonored most recently owing a debt to sects in The City. But while subtlety is most often a means to violent ends for Corvo, Agent 47, Sam Fisher and Ezio's lot, Garrett is a lover, not a fighter. A lover of, er, other people's stuff.
Newcomers Eidos Montreal will champion that silent-not-violent approach when our favourite thief steals the limelight again next year, 10 years on from Ion Storm's attempt, Thief: Deadly Shadows. In the interim, hundreds of fan missions have been created with level editors and The Dark Mod for Doom 3 - all to scratch the itch that arose 15 years ago with Thief's pioneering gameplay.
