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Dishonored is now a stone cold immersive sim classic, but there's a world in which its rat-infested city streets and creative stealth options never saw the light of day because Bethesda originally had the game's developers work on Thief 4 and a Bladerunner adaptation.
Arkane Studios alum and Dishonored co-directors Raphael Colantonio and Harvey Smith were recently playing through their beloved imsim in a new YouTube video, where the duo took a second to remember how the project came together in the first place.
"Before we did Dishonored, we were supposed to either do Thief or Bladeunner," Colantonio recalls. As he remembers, Bethesda approached the studio to work on a Thief pitch that it was trying to secure the rights to, with a Bladerunner proposition coming soon after.
"Which is basically like coming to two cats and saying, 'We have a big bag of catnip here on the one side. We have another bag of catnip here. Which one do you want? You want both?' We were both so excited," Smith says. "Bladerunner and Thief, like two of our favorite things of all time."
Smith teases that the studio "had an amazing pitch for Thief, which would have been Thief 4," a sequel to one of the most influential stealth series ever made.
"We were in a in a such a dire situation business-wise and they came up not only to save us, but also to bring, frankly, the IP that I would have liked to work on the most," Colantonio adds. In the end, both deals fell through and the directors feared Bethesda wouldn't be interested in working with the team without a big IP attached. "Eventually they said, 'Ah, it's okay - keep what you're doing and, uh, and call it Dishonored.'" The rest is history.
Smith continued to work at Arkane Austin until its closure a few years back. Colantonio founded another developer, WolfEye Studios, that's currently making an unannounced first-person imsim. Meanwhile, Arkane Lyon is developing Marvel's Blade.
