A Different Road To Dunwall
Dishonored is remembered today as one of the great modern immersive sims, full of grimy streets, strange powers, rats, guards, and stealth routes that let players improvise. But Raphael Colantonio and Harvey Smith have said Arkane’s path to that game could have gone somewhere very different.
While playing through Dishonored together in a YouTube video, the two co-directors looked back at how the project began. Before Corvo’s story became Arkane’s own world, Bethesda had spoken with the studio about two established names: Thief and Blade Runner.
Two Dream Projects
Colantonio recalled that, before Dishonored, Arkane was expected to work on either Thief or Blade Runner. According to him, Bethesda first came to the studio with a Thief pitch while trying to secure the rights. A Blade Runner idea followed soon after.
For Arkane, those were not casual offers. Smith described both properties as personal favorites for the team, the kind of projects that naturally fit the studio’s love of stealth, mood, choice, and carefully built spaces. He also said Arkane had a strong pitch for Thief, which would have been Thief 4.
A Studio Looking For A Lifeline
The timing mattered. Colantonio said Arkane was in a serious business situation, and Bethesda’s interest felt like both practical help and a chance to work on intellectual property he deeply wanted to touch. For a studio shaped by immersive sim thinking, Thief especially carried a lot of history.
In the end, neither deal happened. The Thief plan and the Blade Runner proposal both fell through, leaving the directors worried that Bethesda might no longer want to work with them. Instead, that uncertainty opened the door for Arkane to build something original.
That original project became Dishonored, a game that still carries traces of the lineage around it. It did not become Thief 4, and it did not become a Blade Runner adaptation, but it kept the spirit of reactive stealth, dense atmosphere, and player freedom that made those names so exciting to Arkane in the first place.
Z-retro’s view: this bit of game history is a useful reminder that classics do not always begin as fixed ideas. Sometimes a missed license, a failed pitch, and a difficult moment can leave just enough room for a studio to make its own lasting world.
