Thief devs once considered letting Garrett shrink rat-sized to sneak through drains

Long before Dishonored made rat possession a signature mechanic, Looking Glass Studios was already toying with a similar idea for Thief: The Dark Project — and then quietly shelved it.

In a 2018 PC Gamer magazine interview marking Thief's 20th anniversary, lead designer Tim Stellmach revealed that the studio had considered giving Garrett the ability to shrink himself down and crawl through small passageways like drains and mouse holes. The idea never made it into the final game for two reasons: it would have been too much work to implement properly, and — in Stellmach's own words — "it started raising questions that we didn't want to answer." He didn't elaborate on what those questions were, but the implications are pretty clear. Thief is a pure stealth game where getting from A to B undetected is the entire point. Handing Garrett a get-out-of-jail-free card in the form of rat-sized tunnels would have undermined the tension that makes the game work.

That tension is exactly what separates Thief from its spiritual successors. Dishonored gives Corvo rat possession as one of several supernatural tools, but it also gives players a perfectly viable fallback — just kill everyone. Garrett doesn't have that luxury. He can handle one guard at a time, maybe, and that's it. The constraint isn't a flaw; it's the design. As Richard Cobbett argued in his retrospective on how Thief defined the stealth genre, that singular focus is what made it one of the great immersive sims. Nightdive Studios is now working on Thief: The Dark Project Remastered, announced at the PC Gaming Show in June, which will include the extra missions from Thief Gold alongside a range of other improvements. Original Thief artist Daniel Thron has been brought back to help redo the game's cutscenes.

No release date has been set for the remaster yet, but interest is high — and now that we know Garrett almost had shrinking powers, the wait feels a little more surreal.