Thief (video game)
The Thief series of video games are first-person action role-playing games wherein the player takes the role of Garrett, a thief in a mythical time resembling a cross between the middle ages and the Victorian era. Garrett starts out each one as an amoral character, but ends up saving the world.The main concept behind Thief was to turn the first-person shooter idea on its head. Everyone plays first-person games with the idea of killing enemy after enemy in a Rambo style until bored or until the game is beaten. But Thief takes a different approach; the main tactic of the game is to avoid fights and not to kill.
The game is sometimes described as either a first-person sneaker or first-person looter to emphasize this difference.
Through careful use of sound effects and a very involving plot line, the player is drawn in to the milieu of the game.
The equipment in Thief mixes medieval weapons such as a sword, bow and arrow with modern inventions which include flash bombs, explosive mines and lockpicking tools.
Thief was originally published by Looking Glass Studios, which went out of business in 2001. The long-anticipated third game of the series is being written by developers at ION Storm Austin (the team includes many ex-Looking Glass employees) and will be published by Eidos Interactive.
The game used the word "taffer" (meaning something like joker or fool), which is sometimes heard among fans.
See also: Steampunk
Thief is also the name of an older, arcade video game popularized in the early 1980s and extremely similar to Pac-Man; in it, the player operated a car being chased by several blue police cars. The board was littered with dollar bills which the player scored by running over them. There were also four special spaces near the corners of the board (the equivalent of Pac-Man's energizers); hitting one of them caused the police cars to temporarily turn red. While the police cars were red the player could crash into them and score extra points; if contact with the police cars occurred at any other time the player lost a life. When all the dollar bills were picked up on one board, the player advanced to the next.