Former Arkane Studios developers and Dishonored co-directors Raphael Colantonio and Harvey Smith played through the opening of the beloved stealth game on YouTube. That video revealed many details about the development of Dishonored, including that it was the direct result of pitches for Thief 4 and a Blade Runner game that did not come to fruition.
About ten minutes into this first Devs Play video, the topic of those came up and the pair of developers delved into those projects more than they have before. Colantonio explained that Bethesda initially came to Arkane Studios, which was struggling financially at the time, and offered it the chance to work on a game in the Thief series.
“I was so excited and, you know, we were in such a dire situation business-wise, and they came up not only to save us from business, but also to bring the, frankly, the IP that I would have liked to work on the most,” Colantonio said. Smith would go on to say outright that the game would’ve been Thief 4.
Later, Bethesda approached Arkane Studios and revealed that it might secure the rights to make a Blade Runner video game, and asked the studio to pitch a project based on that IP as well. Now, two teams within the studio were competing over what the studio would make next.
Colantonio led the Thief 4 team, which produced some concept videos of its own. Smith led the Blade Runner team, which he recalls rendered the Epser computer in 3D and started animation work, as its main characters “would be doing things with their bodies that humans couldn’t do.” Colantonio and Smith look back positively on these pitches, but Bethesda ultimately could not secure the rights for Arkane to make games based on those IPs.
While Colantonio was concerned that Bethesda would abandon Arkane after those projects fell through, the publisher came to them with a different proposition. “None of them worked out, and we thought maybe they’re going to, you know, shut down the deal,” Colantonio explained. “We were not acquired yet, but we had this deal with them to do the next Thief or the next Blade Runner. Eventually, they said, ‘It’s okay, keep what you’re doing and call it Dishonored.’ The point here is that [Dishonored] started on the base of our version of Thief 4.”
As Harvey’s Blade Runner project also did not see the light of day, he joined Dishonored as co-director. Many features from Thief, like shadows always hiding the player, were eventually phased out of Dishonored. It evolved into having a distinct visual aesthetic and game feel of its own and went on to become a stealth-genre classic.
Eidos Montreal would launch a new Thief game in 2014, but it wasn’t nearly as good as Dishonored. Still, it’s fascinating to learn that Arkane’s definitive game may not have ever existed had Bethesda and Arkane ultimately worked on Blade Runner or Thief 4 instead.