The Making Of Songs Of The Caverns

Terri Brosius talks about designing Thief: Gold’s opera house.

- Terri Brosius

Song of the Caverns is the 11th mission in Thief: Gold, and the last of the three added as part of the Gold expansion. It sees Garrett on the hunt for the Water Talisman, which will help him open the doors to the Haunted Cathedral and steal a mysterious jewel known as the Eye. His search leads him to a sprawling opera house containing the Water Talisman.

The story behind Song’s development offers an insight into both Looking Glass’s process and the atmosphere of the studio behind the game. Song was designed by Terri Brosius, who started work in games in a different capacity entirely.

“I entered the game world sideways, so I was a musician first,” she says. Specifically, Brosius was in a Boston-based band called Tribe, with fellow Thief veterans Eric Brosius and Greg LoPiccolo. Several Looking Glass employees were fans, and the band members ended up writing music for the studio.

DEEP END

What Brosius really wanted to do, however, was write for games. But at the time game studios rarely hired writers, at least not specifically. After applying for various roles at Looking Glass, Brosius was eventually hired as a junior level designer along with two other people.

“There was no way to train designers. We were just, like, thrown in,” Brosius recalls. “The reason I was able to build levels was because Emil Pagliarulo (the creator of Thief II’s Life at the Party), and Randy Smith (the director of