Sticky Fingers on 10/11/2010 at 05:38
Quote Posted by nickie
I mean, you'd never leave the person who'd found Thief for you, would you? :laff:
Damn! In that case, I'm stuck with myself :tsktsk: :p
In my case, it's kudos to the TDP package designers.
In 2002 (I think), I wandered into a 2nd-hand game shop & was immediatedly drawn to this one called Thief: A Dark Project. Read the back of the box & thought playing a thief in a fantasy setting sounded great...and my crappy comp could play it (unlike most things from the past 3 years)....
and it was only 10AUD. Bought it, loved it &, as soon as possible, upgraded my comp so I could play TMA.
Haplo on 10/11/2010 at 05:46
I discovered Thief quite late; that was when I got my hands on a Thief 2 CD around Christmas 2004.
Guess what I was doing during the new year's day fireworks.
Azaran on 10/11/2010 at 06:44
I discovered Thief back in 2003. I found the Thief 1 demo in this Tomb Raider CD I had. The first time I played it I found it a bit unusual and hard to adjust to. I left it for about a month and then came back to it - this time I was hooked. It would be some 2 years before I was able to find the full TG game for sale at a local store (almost impossible to find locally - back then I didn't have a credit card so I couldn't order it online :(), but I did find Thief 2 in a store just a few months after discovering the T1 demo. So began my love affair with the Thief games.
Xorak on 10/11/2010 at 06:46
I was in a computer store with a friend during lunch break at work. It was 2002. The store had a used copy of T2 for about $8. I didn't know anything about it, but my friend described it as 'It's pretty cool, you get to sneak around and steal treasure in tombs and castles. And there's a stage where you can shoot fire arrows at wizards and set their robes on fire and then watch them run around screaming.'
I bought it just because I had it in my hand and it was cheap and it seemed a cool premise for a game. After loading it up though, I was hooked instantly. It certainly had an atmosphere that I never experienced before, and sadly which doesn't affect me in the same way now. I remember searching everywhere for the secrets -- like absolutely every (and still missed them). I played the first three levels, then went and got TG, and played that first, then replayed T2. To this day, I've never set a wizard's robe on fire. But I believe my friend was mistaken, and was actually referring to the wizards in the Mage Tower level of TG, not T2.
Jah on 10/11/2010 at 07:26
It was in January 2002. I had just moved to a new apartment and was told it would take about a month to get my broadband Internet connected, so I figured I'd buy a game to keep me occupied until then. I found a SoldOut copy of TDP in a bargain bin for maybe 10 EUR. I had read reviews of TDP and TMA and translated a preview article of TMA for a magazine I worked for, so I knew what the game was about. Since I've never really been into action-oriented games, I thought Thief probably wouldn't be my cup of tea, but since it was cheap, I figured I wouldn't have much to lose - after all, the reviews had been very positive. I soon realized I was hooked, and after finishing TDP, immediately went to look for TMA. A couple of years later I discovered FM's, and have remained addicted ever since.
Melan on 10/11/2010 at 07:57
Quote Posted by Sticky Fingers
Read the back of the box & thought playing a thief in a fantasy setting sounded great...and my crappy comp could play it (unlike most things from the past 3 years)....
and it was only 10AUD. Bought it, loved it &, as soon as possible, upgraded my comp so I could play TMA.
I bought my first 3d card so I could play the "Unwelcome Guest" demo (which I still hold superior to the final mission). Until then, everything was in glorious software rendering (which is not just dark, but dark dark). :laff:
Oh, and FMs - it was my brother who had played one first (Gathering at the Bar), and he said it wasn't as impressive as the original missions, so I didn't bother. (He also tried the editor way before me, built half of a pretty simplistic cathedral with Hammer haunts, but never completed it.) But a year or two later, around 2001, I was bored, found The Circle, and downloaded the top rated missions, starting with the Death of Garrett... the rest is history.
Dia on 10/11/2010 at 12:48
My late husband had read an online article about TDP back in '99 and told me about this game where there were no guns and you had to be stealthy in order to achieve your objectives. He said according to the article the various AI in the game carried on conversations in the background which had nothing to do with the main character, and that you could blackjack anyone who got in your way, which I found rather novel. He then found the demo, played it, showed it to me and I was captivated. He went out & bought the game that same day. I'm still captivated.
LordBafford on 10/11/2010 at 14:02
I think the first time I heard about TDP might have been around 1998 in one or two PC games magazines, however the first time I actually played Thief was in Summer 2002. I visited my friend in North London that day, and one of the places we visited was Blockbusters. Their games section included a budget section and they had a special deal. They had the Sold Out Software versions of TDP and TMA and so I thought it was finally time I got to play the games.
I first installed and played TDP. I was super excited when I began to walk around the streets near Lord Bafford's Manor. I was talking to my friend at the time and shouting "This looks amazing!." When I snuck in and started sneaking around, I immediately became addicted. The strong storyline really captivated me.
Xamiche on 11/11/2010 at 04:00
Somewhere in 1999 my friend was showing off his new Pentium 2-266MHz with Voodoo 3. For you younger folks who missed the whole transition from 2d software rendering to 3d hardware acceleration, you might find it hard to imagine why we were in such awe of the Voodoo 3. It really was a remarkable card. Anyway, he let me drive it for a few hours and I was going through a couple of magazine disks and I found a demo for a strange game called Thief. The premise seemed pretty cool for the time. Quake 3 hadn't yet been released and I was well and truly over Duke Nukem 3D and others FPS's in general, so it was a fresh concept.
I remember starting up the demo, knocking out the guard by the well and jumping into the water. There's that area where you're swimming along and you enter a round room with a dripping grate in the ceiling. The frame-rate blew my mind. The difference between software rendered and hardware rendered was light years apart and sitting in the dark watching a huge 17 inch screen I couldn't believe the depth of what I was seeing.
After I climbed up into Bafford's mansion and over heard that guard telling Benny how they should 'Beef up security' I pulled my sword out and began to try and Quake my way through the game. Of course Benny and his mate ended my journey very quickly and it dawned on me the real depth of the game. I went out and bought the game even though I didn't have a machine good enough to run, though I got to play on my friend's P2-266, and the rest as they say is history.
jtr7 on 11/11/2010 at 05:15
Sometime in '98-'99, I went to see a friend who lives about 45-minutes away in a place called Rimrock, Arizona, according to our annual tradition of hooking up at least once a year to jam on some quick'n'dirty original compositions, during which I would run the four-track cassette recorder, program the drum machine, and help with bass and vocals and FX, while he would sing and play lead and rhythm electric guitars, in a comical attempt at metal, thrash, and death metal, but all for fun and to scratch an itch, over about five or six hours.
That day, when I arrived, he was in his bedroom on his computer, killing time until I showed up. He was playing what I would later realize was Assassins! when I got a chance to play it for myself for the first time in 2001. I don't remember seeing Farkus that day, but I remember well him following Quince and Jacow back to Ramirez's estate. Since that takes a little while, he told me a little about the game and how different it was, and when he arrived just off the street and outside the gates, with the gravel path going left and right, he then demonstrated the moss arrow. It all looked interesting, but what struck me was how my friend was in a different mental mode with this game than I'd ever seen him. He's a big gamer, and loves action and shooters and racing games the most, but likes a lot of other games as well. On other occasions I watched him playing Doom II, Duke Nukem 3D, Quake, Hexen, and how he was definitely in bloodthirsty fast-twitch kill-everything mode. So this was a startling contrast. And he simply ended the Thief session by saying "I love Thief."
At the time, there was no way I was going be able to play that game myself, having an old computer and not knowing when I'd be able to purchase a new system, and it wasn't until 2006 that I got my own system that could play TDP, so the memory of my initial experience as a passive watcher was in the back of my mind, but I didn't have reason to look into it, until 2001, when TMA came with a local friend's new computer, and I remembered my music buddy playing a Thief game. I played TMA twice through on the friend's new computer, got hooked, and with two specific phrases from the game driving me, went on the Internet looking for more Thief. I found TTLG during my search, and then we ordered TDP. This was a while before we knew about Gold, and eventually bought Gold, but parted ways before I played it for the first time in 2007 on my own new system.
The phrases were the one from Karras telling Garrett he gave him his metal eye (I just had to know the first part of the story, and I hadn't seen the mission I remembered my friend playing!), and Garrett saying "Tell me," after asking if there was more and Artemus saying there was, so I had to know if there was or was going to be a sequel!
