Purse snatchers vs robo-folk
Dishonored co-directors Raphael Colantonio and Harvey Smith seem like good mates. In a newly published YouTube let's play of their creation, they sit side by side, both dressed in black t-shirts like a married couple who've gone to great pains to coordinate their threads. Would that still be the case if their efforts to make Thief 4 and a Blade Runner game respectively hadn't ended up being mashed together to form 2012's sneaky holiday to Dunwall? Perhaps not, given Smith said it felt as though the pair needed couples therapy by the time they wrapped up a game which wasn't based on a single established work one director would have loved more than the other.
Recounting Bethesda's initial decision to offer Arkane the chance to work on a new Thief or Blade Runner back in the day, the pair understandably likened it to being offered two different flavours of catnip. "Bladerunner came a little later," Colantonio recalled. "At first, it was just Thief and I was like so excited. We were in such a dire situation business-wise and [Bethesda] came up not only to save us from business, but also to bring frankly the IP that I would have liked to work on the most."
"We had an amazing pitch for Thief," Smith continued. "It would have been Thief 4." Colantonio added that things went as far as putting together some videos for Thief, before Smith outlined some of the early work done on the Blade Runner side in addition to a story pitch, which included the Esper computer Deckard famously uses to analyse a photo in the original film and some replicant fighting that leant into the androids being able to push their bodies in ways humans can't. While both directors liked both Thief and Blade Runner, they naturally gravitated towards the one they were most into, Thief for Colantonio and Smith for Blade Runner.
"There was a little bit of a competition in a way, because even though we wanted what was best for the company, at the end of the day I would have been devastated if it was Blade Runner," Colantonio said. "Because it [would have] meant that I was not directing it and also because it [would have] meantthat I [didn't] care so much for it as much as I care for Thief and vice versa [on Smith's side]."
Given that, in my eye it's maybe best that both sides ended up - following some fears of Bethesda cancelling their development deal with Arkane rather than taking up one of the projects - combining what they'd been working on to form Dishonored. While they made their co-directing duties on the stealth game work, the pair were honest here about occasionally butting heads. "I remember we got to the very end of the project and it felt like we had needed couples therapy or something," Smith recalled. That's despite the pair making a point of allowing each other to have more say over certain parts of the game, a compromise which I imagine might have been tougher to make had they ended up leading either Thief or Blade Runner following a tough decision to drop one in favour of the other. Naturally, they'll both have felt attachment to Dishonoured, but a new series like that probably didn't boast the same pressure to live up to a singular or set vision as a new entry in an established series might.
So, while this isn't the first time the pair have mentioned dipping their toes into Thief and Blade Runner ahead of Dishonored, it has left me feeling more sure that the timeline we got was the ideal one. Much as it's always easy to yearn for those mysterious and unknowable games which never come out or are currently on the horizon over known quantities.