Visually, The Dark Project is sort of a cross between the films The City of Lost Children and Brazil, with definite medieval overtones. Garrett's profession will take him to a variety of environments within his city of residence, including: seedy docks, the darkened city streets themselves, ominous castles, catacombs buried deep underground, and even an ancient lost city.

Well, the credits in the manual can be misleading. Game development is incredibly collaborative, and it's often impossible to pinpoint who did exactly what.

For example, Thief 2. If I remember correctly, the ORIGINAL concept was that there was some kind of "rust disease." Note that last cutscene of Thief: TDP, when Garrett and Artemis are talking. They pass by someone shivering in the street. I believe that cutscene was originally written by Terri B, and that's what she envisioned, the "rust disease." When Thief 2 actually started devlopment, that idea morphed considerably (but the initial groundwork had already been laid).

The Hammers and Mechanists were basically the Catholics and Protestants...that was the high-level paradigm we used.

The story itself was actually put together by several different people -- Terri Borsius, Randy Smith, Dan Thron and myself. We sort of figured out how the main arcs of the story should fit together.

Who wrote Garrett's dialogue and the Guards' dialogue? Well, in Thief 2, the individual designers had a large hand in writing those lines. People like Sara Verelli, Rob Caminos, Mike Chryznowski, Randy Smith, Terri B. and me all contributed. Terri was on point for cleaning a lot of it up.

Oh, and let's not forget Laura Baldwin...she was responsible for all the "Woodsy" dialogue and was generally the person to go to if you wanted to "Thief up" your dialogue.

The influences are too numerous to list. On Thief 2, and even going into Thief 3, City of Lost Children was a HUGE reference for the City. I was personally inspired by everything fromt he literature of Charles Dickens and Jules Verne to the level design in the original Rainbow Six. For the first half of Thief 3's development we had regular movie nights where we'd get together and watch films with particular relevance. We watched everything from The Third Man to the original black and white Beauty and the Beast to the pilot from the Robin Hood series that originally aired on Showtime.

On Thief 3, Terri was the writer and had more a hand in crafting the story than anyone else. But the game was also largely Randy Smith's vision. A good deal of Thief 3's groundwork was put down by the "core team" in the very early days of the project...that was Randy, Lulu Lamer, Terri B. and myself.

Of course, a lot changed from those early days. I think when Jordan came on there was spec for an orphanage, or someplace creepy. He took that and came back with the Shalebridge Cradle. :) That conversation between the fence and the Garrett impersonator? Jeremy Graves' idea. Fiction about the old woman in the Seaside Mansion? Nate Blaisdell. The Kurshok? Those guys were my babies early on. Oh, and all the creepy stuff associated with Gamall? That was all Terri.

So you see, there are a lot of hands in the pot. There were in the past and there likely will be in the future. That's just the nature of game design.

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Emil