Of the many remarkable abilities possessed by Dishonored hero Corvo Attano, perhaps the most remarkable is, well, possession: Corvo can possess creatures, most famously the game’s plentiful rats, to get up to all sorts of trouble, including accessing locations that would be inaccessible to his full-sized body. As it turns out, this wasn’t an entirely original idea. More than a decade earlier it had been considered for use in Dishonored’s masterpiece progenitor, Thief: The Dark Project.
Thief basically is Dishonored, speaking very broadly: A guy who’s good at sneaking around gets caught up in a bunch of political nonsense he’d really rather avoid because of a woman he can’t admit to being in love with because it’d be weird. One chief difference is that Garrett, the titular thief of the Thief games (the ones that matter, anyway) doesn’t have any powers.
He almost did, though. In a 2018 PC Gamer magazine interview marking the 20th anniversary of Thief’s debut, lead designer Tim Stellmach said Looking Glass Studios had pondered giving Garrett the ability to shrink himself and travel through small passageways like drains. The idea was ultimately dropped, though, for eminently practical reasons.
“We just decided it was gonna be way too much work to do it right,” Stellmach explained. And, maybe more importantly: “It started raising questions that we didn’t want to answer.”