~An Introduction to Thief Fan-Missions

            I’ve already gone over some missions from Thief: The Dark Project, and now I’m going to introduce “fan missions.” I already kind of did back in the blog’s introductory posts, but here I’ll make sure that I’m giving them a proper introduction.

            Thief fan-missions are missions built for the official Thief games by fans of the games, who are also almost always members of the “Through the Looking Glass” fan community (ttlg.com). These missions are mostly just single missions, but sometimes the more ambitious authors, or teams of authors, make multi-mission campaigns. The missions are built in either Thief I or Thief II’s game engines, using the DromEd editing utility that comes with the first two Thief games. (There are also Thief III and “Dark Mod” fan-missions, but none of these are covered in this blog.)

            These fan missions are plentiful. Here’s a link to a full listing, by category, of Thief fan missions. Most of them are for Thief II, but I begin here with a few for Thief I.

Thief FMs, which I’ll start calling them for short (as all the fans on the forums do), are amazing entertainment experiences. For me, personally, they could be the only entertainment experience, and I’d be just fine! My purpose for including them here is to demonstrate that Thief’s design principles, and what they mean for narrative construction in virtual environments, can translate into fan-made missions as well as the official-release missions.

I’ll start by going over a few select Thief I FMs. They each get an introduction in the video below.

Enjoy!