Thief: The Dark Project Remaster Developers Find Developer Messages in Game Code 28 Years Later

Developers working on the upcoming remaster of Thief: The Dark Project have uncovered bizarre developer notes and temporary workarounds preserved inside the original engine code.

Digital Foundry recently released a new episode of its DF Retro Super Show podcast featuring the team at Nightdive Studios, which is currently developing Thief: The Dark Project Remastered.

During the discussion, one of the studio’s developers revealed what the team encountered while dissecting the game’s original codebase:

My favorite thing when going through the Dark Engine codebase is finding all the snarky comments left behind by Looking Glass or Irrational Games programmers. They write completely wild things about the code: “Giant hack. Never do this”; “Need to fix this before E3 1998”; “Delete after E3.”

According to the developer, several of those quick fixes even carried over into the final code for Thief 2.

The original development team had the advantage of working alongside the people who wrote those systems. Nightdive Studios faces a steeper challenge nearly three decades later:

It is much harder for us to get into all of this and change things, because first you have to study the systems, understand their weak spots, and figure out the hacks that were added in. And I think that is what always makes Nightdive’s work so high quality: we really dive into the old code, study it, understand how everything works, and then essentially rebuild the system and make it better.

Image source: Nightdive Studios, Looking Glass Studios, Atari, Eidos Interactive

Players can add Thief: The Dark Project Remastered to their Steam wishlist. The studio has not yet announced a specific release date.

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