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.
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.
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.
It had a physically based sound engine I think?
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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.
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.
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.
The software renderer did display many effects and even textures different. This video does a great breakdown:
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?
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.
Original Unreal had soft rendering just like Quake 1/2 and so on. Though at that point my brother and I had saved up enough beans to buy a Voodoo2.
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.
I loved Thief 1/2, these games were way ahead of their time and defined the genre for years to come.
"Terra Nova: Strike Force Centauri" Oh my gosh, I remember that game. I picked it up at a computer swap meet, and it was awesome!
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.
5-hour interview with Sean Barrett where he also talks about the technical details of the Thief engine:
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)
https://www.filfre.net/2025/10/a-looking-glass-half-empty-pa...
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.