GOG's Thief gloss-up is the best way to play the classic until Nightdive's remaster arrives

GOG quietly put together a polished-up version of Thief: The Dark Project and its expanded edition Thief Gold, bundling fan mods and patches into a clean, modern-ready package. The official Nightdive remaster is still coming this winter, but this is a genuinely solid way to play in the meantime.

The headline addition is Peter Wright's Gamepad Mod, which turns the 1998 stealth classic into something you can comfortably run on a controller from your couch. Radial menus pop up for equipment selection, the game slows slightly to let you choose, and the whole thing feels seamless on an Xbox One controller — not a hacky bolt-on. Beyond that, NewDark, the fan patch that's become essentially mandatory for running Thief on modern hardware, is now baked into the default installation. That means widescreen resolutions work out of the box, no manual modding required. GOG's role here is mostly curator: tracking down the right mods, getting permissions, and bundling everything together so you don't have to go hunting across fan sites yourself.

Thief: The Dark Project, developed by Looking Glass Studios and released in 1998, is one of the founding texts of the stealth genre — a first-person game built around shadow, sound, and patience rather than combat. It has aged remarkably well in terms of design, but getting it running properly on modern systems has historically required a fair bit of DIY effort. That's exactly the gap this GOG release fills. Nightdive Studios, known for meticulous remasters of classics like System Shock and Quake, is handling the full remaster due later in 2026.

This isn't a replacement for what Nightdive is building — no new assets, no bells and whistles — but it does solve the practical problem of just wanting to play the game without faffing around. For anyone who's been putting off a replay, or coming to Thief for the first time ahead of the remaster, this is the version to grab right now.