The Lost City

Paul Neurath discusses Looking Glass’ cancelled plans for Thief III.

- Paul Neurath

Looking Glass Studios announced its closure on May 24, 2000, just four months after the launch of its final game, Thief II. The studio had weathered financial troubles for many years, but its end still came as a shock. This was because Looking Glass had all but settled a new deal with Eidos Interactive, with the primary focus of the deal being on the Thief franchise. Indeed, when Looking Glass closed, it had been hard at work on a third Thief game for the best part of a year.

“Thief became one of the best-selling games that Looking Glass ever did,” says Paul Neurath, the founder of Looking Glass Studios. While it was a slow-burning success, the initial sales figures were enough that Eidos wanted a sequel. “But they wanted Thief II to be very modern scale, the budget was very modest, the timescale was very tight. It was, ‘Do a fast follow-up on Thief.’”

This is why Thief II is so mechanically similar to The Dark Project. Nonetheless, Looking Glass was able to improve upon its previous work because, second time around, it understood what kind of game it was making. “We were really able to leverage our knowledge of how stealth worked, which I think made Thief II a better game,” says Neurath.

Just as work on Thief II began, however, sales of The Dark Project started to take off, and Eidos began to see a viable franchise in Looking Glass’s work. So it signed the studio for a third Thief game, one that would be much more ambitious than Thief II. “The budget was three or fourfold higher than