Arkane almost made Thief 4 and a Blade Runner game before Dishonored

The game Arkane never got to make

Arkane did not just flirt with Thief 4. It built an entire alternate timeline around it, then walked away with Dishonored in hand when the licensed doors closed. That is the kind of origin story that changes how you read a studio’s best work, especially if you care about stealth games, immersive sims, and the lost projects that quietly shape them.

The new account of Arkane’s pre-Dishonored years turns that near-miss into something more than trivia. It shows a studio that was already thinking hard about what a modern Thief-like game should be, only to have the final result emerge as an original IP instead. For readers who grew up on stealth sandboxes and systemic level design, the emotional center is obvious: what kind of game history did we almost get?

A studio in a fragile spot

Bethesda Softworks did not come to Arkane casually. According to the studio’s co-directors, Arkane was in a dire financial position when Bethesda first approached it with the idea of making a new Thief game. That matters, because it frames the whole story as more than creative chemistry. It was also a business lifeline, the sort of deal that can decide whether a studio survives long enough to ship anything at all.

The publisher’s interest did not stop there. After the Thief idea, Bethesda also floated a Blade Runner pitch, and the possibility of licensed work gave Arkane a path forward while it was still struggling. ZeniMax Media completed its acquisition of Arkane Studios on August 12, 2010, and Arkane’s offices in Lyon, France and Austin, Texas were part of a larger transition from precarious independence to publisher ownership. Dishonored arrived in 2012, with Eidos Montreal later releasing a new Thief game in 2014, but Arkane’s route to that moment was anything but direct.

Two pitches, two internal teams

Raphaël Colantonio and Harvey Smith did not just talk about these licenses in the abstract. They split Arkane into two internal teams, one focused on Thief 4 and the other on Blade Runner. Colantonio said Thief was the IP he most wanted to work on, while Smith said he was a major fan and expert on Blade Runner, and their enthusiasm gave the pitches real momentum inside the studio.

The work itself got surprisingly far for something that never became a shipped game. Colantonio’s Thief team produced concept videos, while Smith’s Blade Runner group rendered the Epser computer in 3D and began animation work. That detail is the one that really sticks, because it makes the cancellation feel tactile. This was not a vague licensing conversation. Arkane was actively prototyping two different futures, and both had enough substance to feel real.

How Dishonored inherited the ghost of Thief

When the rights did not come together for either project, Bethesda told Arkane to keep building what it was already doing and call it Dishonored. That single decision is one of those rare pivot points that makes a finished game feel almost accidental, even though it clearly came out of a studio with very specific instincts.

This is why Dishonored reads less like a random original IP and more like a studio-agnostic answer to a question Thief fans had been asking for years: what would this kind of game look like with modern production values, a new world, and Arkane’s obsession with player choice? The level design, the mood, and the systemic thinking all feel like the aftermath of those lost license pitches. Arkane did not simply stumble into immersive-sim greatness. It carried that DNA forward when the branded version of the idea vanished.

Why stealth fans still care about the missed version

The loss of Arkane’s Thief and Blade Runner projects hits harder because the wider community had already been circling the idea of Thief 4 for years. PC Gamer noted a leaked CGI demo reel in 2011 that stirred public speculation well before Arkane’s origin story was widely discussed. The franchise was already a magnet for hope, rumors, and disappointment, so learning that Arkane had once been in the running only sharpens the ache.

That is also why the comparison to Eidos Montreal’s 2014 Thief matters. Arkane’s version never materialized, which left Dishonored as the more enduring stealth-immersive-sim landmark from that era. For a lot of players, that is both a consolation prize and a haunting what-if. The industry got an excellent original game, but it also lost the chance to see how Arkane would have interpreted one of the genre’s defining names.

The beauty of a cancelled future

The most revealing part of this story is how personal it sounds to the people who made those pitches. Colantonio clearly wanted Thief most, Smith lit up at Blade Runner, and both men were excited enough to lead separate internal teams as if either outcome could become the studio’s next identity. That human stake is what keeps the story from feeling like dry business history.

In the end, Arkane lost the licensed games and kept the one that mattered most to its future. That is the strange luck baked into Dishonored’s legacy: it became a classic by surviving the collapse of two other possibilities. The ghost of Thief 4 still hangs over it, and that is exactly why the story endures.