One factor I’ve realized in journalism is that the stupidest questions can result in probably the most fascinating solutions, if solely as a result of no one else could be such a colossal dumbass to contemplate asking them. This proved true lately as I sought a solution to an especially foolish query: How tall is Garrett, the protagonist of the Thief sequence of stealth video games?
Why did I need to reply this query? The fact is it has been bugging me for years, ever since I learn on-line that Garrett is canonically six toes tall. Having all the time imagined Garrett to be significantly shorter than six toes, this determine has by no means sat proper with me.
This could also be as a result of I’m an unremarkable 5’7″, and since I subconsciously envision game characters to be a similar height when playing first-person, discovering they are taller or shorter than that can be surprising. But Thief itself is somewhat ambiguous about Garrett’s height.
While many characters are barely shorter or an identical top to Garrett, some, just like the Hammerites, are considerably taller, suggesting that Garrett is of common top at finest. And when you Google what the worldwide common top for males is, you mainly get me, so it is a affordable assumption that Garrett could be round my top.
Anyway, I let the topic be for a very long time, as barely extra necessary issues had been taking place like a world pandemic. But writing a narrative concerning the top of Elden Ring: Nightreign characters brought about the query to come up once more, stepping out of the shadows of my thoughts wielding the blackjack of curiosity. When I appeared into it a second time, I acquired a completely completely different reply, one which claims Garrett is 5’5″, even shorter than I’d beforehand believed.
This made more sense to me than the original figure, but after writing up the Nightreign story, something about it still nagged at me. So I went back for another look, and it turned out that the 5’5″ determine isn’t for the unique Garrett, however the Garrett depicted in Eidos Montreal’s 2014 reboot.
A Tumblr blogger going by Haethel calculated reboot Garrett’s height by evaluating his dimension to a different character within the sport, whose top is listed within the sport’s artbook as being 6’7″. Haethel’s calculation appears correct, however because the reboot’s Garrett isn’t the unique Garrett, it is a moot level.
Looking into this more deeply, I discovered two things. First, proposed figures for Garrett’s canonical height are all over the place. Second, Thief players have been arguing about this for much longer than I’d realised. A thread on the TTLG forums from way back in 2004 suggests heights that range from 5’6″ all the best way as much as 6’2″.
Eventually, I concluded I couldn’t rely on the internet alone for a definitive answer, figuring the best way to resolve this would be to ask somebody who really knows Thief. The obvious move would be to ask the developers, but Looking Glass Studios shut its doors 25 years ago. While the designers are still very much around, with many of them working on Thief’s multiplayer successor Thick as Thieves, it seemed unlikely they would remember such a specific detail from a game rapidly approaching 30 years old.
Instead, what I really needed was someone with a more recent working memory of Thief, and more specifically, its underlying tools and technology. With this in mind, I decided to ask Romain Barrilliot. Barrilliot is a level designer at Arkane Studios, creators of immersive sims like Dishonored and Deathloop. But he’s also a Thief expert, having designed fan missions (FMs) for the game for years. This includes leading the design of the incredible unofficial Thief campaign The Black Parade, the best Thief experience created since 2005’s T2X: Shadows of the Metal Age.
In short, Barrilliot knows Thief inside and out, so if anyone could come up with a definitive answer, it would be him. I dropped Barrilliot an email asking my stupid question, and received a response exactly nine minutes later.
“I’ll get again to you with a extra exact reply in just a few hours however Garrett is certainly 6 toes tall in T1 and possibly T2 as effectively.”
I was at once surprised and intrigued. Not only did Barrilliot cite the initial figure I had dismissed, he did so with disarmingly rapid certainty. I eagerly awaited his full explanation, and when it arrived that same evening, it did not disappoint.
Barrilliot kicked off his answer by showing me the below image:
“The factor chosen on the left is a 6ft tall brush,” Barrilliot explains. “Each sq. is 2ft, which equals 32 pixels on a scale 16 texture (which is the default scale) the feel itself being 64×64 pixels. Immediately proper of the comb is Garrett in Thief 1. This mannequin is known as playbox and is rarely seen in any respect throughout gameplay.”
Hold on a second, that turdy-looking rectangle in the middle is Garrett? You mean to say that all this time I’ve been slinking around The City blackjacking guards and pilfering purses as Mr Hankey’s clown-nosed cousin? This is more unsettling than Fallout 3’s tram-headed NPCs. I’m not sure I can ever look at Thief the same way again.
Putting this disturbing revelation aside, Barrilliot points out that playbox is precisely the same height as the brush on the left. “It is precisely 6ft tall.” Hence, Garrett is indeed 6 feet tall in Thief: The Dark Project. He’s also a boggle-eyed grinning stool that’s been fed through the square hole of a giant playdough-shaping machine, but he is at least a strapping 6-foot one of those.
However, things aren’t as clear cut as Barrilliot’s initial response suggested. As you can see, there’s another model in the picture. “To the far proper now we have T2 Garrett, as seen throughout gameplay while you use a scouting orb,” Barrilliot explains. A scouting orb is a small deployable camera Garrett can throw onto the ground. When in the camera’s perspective, Garrett can look back at himself, meaning Looking Glass couldn’t stick with their smiling circus-poop as the character model for the sequel.
As shown in the image, Thief 2’s Garrett has a good forehead over playbox and the 6ft brush, as detailed by Barrilliot. “This Garrett is definitely taller than T1 Garrett, although I believe it is solely beauty. However, if we need to go together with his canonical illustration versus the magnificent specimen within the center, then Garrett is in reality 6’5.3″ to be exact.” Barrilliot gives one other picture evaluating Garrett’s top with a 6’5″ brush, noting that Garrett’s model is “slightly slouched”, so he might be slightly taller when standing upright.
The reason Garrett’s height feels so ambiguous in Thief is simply because the game features some incredibly tall enemies. “The funniest factor is that another NPCs similar to Hammerite dwarf him,” Barrilliot says. “I suppose everybody in The City has eaten plenty of soup once they had been younger.”
There is one last twist in this tale. I asked Barrilliot how exactly distance is measured in Thief, and how such metrics translate to other games. “The Dark Engine could be very standardized,” he replied. “As I stated, 2ft equals 32px on scale 16, so if you wish to use, say, Quake/Half-Life items, you solely want to exchange toes with pixels to get your metrics. A doorway in Thief is often 4x8ft, which makes it 64×128 in Quake/HL items.”
While explaining this, Barrilliot points out that Garrett stands head, shoulders and possibly hips above Quake’s playable character Ranger.” Garrett is rather a lot taller than Ranger, who’s ~56 Quake items tall. “That makes him a ridiculous 3’5″ tall at finest,” Barrilliot says. “The very first thing that shocked me once I performed Thief for the primary time was how rattling tall Garrett was compared to Ranger, who’s undoubtedly a brief king.”
So not solely do now we have a definitive reply for Garrett’s top (which is that it definitively varies from sport to sport), however we additionally know that Garrett might bundle Quake’s protagonist into his swag sack if he felt so inclined. It’s because the saying goes, ask a silly query, get a supremely clever and detailed reply.