It's great that the Nightdive's remasters of various classic games give new players a chance to experience them without having to download a fixpack or remap the controls or whatever, but it's also a wonderful opportunity to learn new things about games we already loved. Each remaster is like an archaeological dig and you never know what it'll uncover.

Digital Foundry's Retro Super Show recently spoke to Nightdive about their current project, a remaster of Looking Glass Studio's stealth classic Thief: The Dark Project. If you're super into the minutiae of Thief, as you should be, it's a cool insight into the making of the game and in particular, the Dark Engine that powers it.

"There's nothing else like it even to this day," Nightdive software engineer Josh Dowell says. As he explains, Nightdive got to see "a very very out of date version control repository for the code" and that made the origins of its oddities more obvious. "I think most of the team that started working on it ended up moving to different projects and then a whole new team took over for the second half of its development," he says.

Back when it was just called The Dark Project, Thief was shown at E3 in 1997 and scheduled to release later that year. It was soon delayed to 1998, and the comments Dowell found attached to the code make it seem like it was still being worked on as it made its way out the door. "My favorite part of looking through the Dark Engine codebase has been seeing all of the evil comments left by the Looking Glass programmers, all the Irrational Games programmers," he says.

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