// PC GAMER — GAMING
Thief designer Randy Smith Evergreen refused to work for Xbox because it would be like 'walking past some stakes with human skulls on them' and pretending 'it's probably fine in this direction'
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Randy Smith Evergreen had been pitching the idea to publishers for a while. A nonviolent RPG, in tune with the values of the Looking Glass games he worked on in the '90s, about a young American woman searching for her missing uncle in Eastern Europe. But the publishers weren't biting. Often, they'd tell Smith Evergreen how much they loved the Thief games he'd helped create, and he'd wonder whether he ought to just be pitching a spiritual sequel to that seminal stealth series instead. Then, Microsoft came calling.
"I had an opportunity to work for a studio that's funded by Xbox, and this was at the lowest moment of our funding search when we were like, 'This might not happen, we might need to think about how to feed our families in some other way,'" he recalls. "I held on—and ultimately it worked out, and I got a funded project—in part because I felt hesitancy to work for a Microsoft-backed studio. I think the recent layoffs at Microsoft showed that there was some wisdom to that decision."
I ask Smith Evergreen where that hesitance came from—positing that it might have something to do with the fact that, over the decades, Microsoft's track record for keeping its studios open has been terrible. "You just answered your own question," he says.
For Xbox to buy them and quickly turn around in a few short years and dissolve the studio was just a pretty dire warning.
By the time Smith Evergreen had to make a decision about whether or not to join Xbox, the company had already shut down Arkane Austin—the Dishonored and Prey studio that, more than any other, had stuck fast to the design principles, worldbuilding and atmosphere of the Thief series.
"I have countless friends who worked there or were the founders of that studio, and I know the high quality work that they're capable of. And I know the tortured history of their last project, Redfall, and that its shortcomings weren't entirely attributable to the talent in that studio," Smith Evergreen says. "For Xbox to buy them and quickly turn around in a few short years and dissolve the studio was just a pretty dire warning. To take a job with them at that point would be like walking past some stakes with human skulls on them and being like, 'It's probably fine in this direction'. And I did consider it, but I'm glad I ultimately went a different way."
Smith Evergreen has "snatched success out of the jaws of defeat", starting a new indie studio to work on an unannounced game that evolved out of the original nonviolent RPG pitch. "It's quite different [from] that, but some of the mechanics of that larger indie RPG were prototyped, and I took what I thought would be most commercially successful and reduced its scope and changed quite a few other things as well," he says. "And that was the new pitch that ultimately got accepted. With some additional modifications that were proposed by the party who ultimately funded us."
Smith Evergreen's team jumped through a lot of hoops in order to loosen those purse-strings. "But where it is today is great," he says. "In our case, it did not torture the concept out of desirability. It's still a great game that we're excited to work on."
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