Two Dream IPs Died So Dishonored Could Live

Replicants doing inhuman things with their bodies. Flips. Reaching into boiling water to grab eggs barehanded. That was the pitch for a Blade Runner game that never shipped, built on animation tests at Arkane Studios after conversations with immersive sim godfather Doug Church. At the same time, the studio had more than just a pitch for Thief 4; it had videos. Both projects died before they ever reached players, and the game that rose from their ashes was Dishonored.

Arkane co-directors Raphael Colantonio and Harvey Smith shared the full story during a new playthrough series on YouTube, revisiting the original Dishonored fourteen years after its release. As spotted by Knoebel on Bluesky, the pair described a period when Bethesda approached the studio with two licensed properties, essentially dangling two dream projects in front of developers who couldn't believe their luck.

"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?'" Smith said. "We were both so excited. Blade Runner and Thief, like two of our favourite things of all time."

Catnip and Catastrophe

The two directors didn't even agree on which project they wanted more. Colantonio was firmly in the Thief camp, calling it "frankly the IP that I would have liked to work on the most." Smith leaned Blade Runner. There was, by their own admission, a friendly internal competition. "I would have been devastated if it was Blade Runner," Colantonio said. Smith felt the reverse.

Arkane wasn't in a position to be picky. Colantonio described the studio as being in "a dire situation business-wise" when Bethesda came calling. The publisher wasn't just offering exciting IPs; it was offering survival. So when both deals collapsed and neither Thief nor Blade Runner materialised, the fear was real. Without a marquee license attached, why would Bethesda stick around?

Bethesda stuck around. "Eventually they said, 'Ah, it's okay, keep what you're doing and call it Dishonored,'" Colantonio recalled. Bethesda parent company ZeniMax went on to acquire Arkane in 2010, and Dishonored shipped two years later to critical acclaim.

What strikes me about this story isn't just the "what if" factor. It's that Dishonored's DNA is openly built on the bones of those two pitches. Colantonio confirmed as much: "It started on the base of Thief 4." The stealth systems, the first-person perspective, the immersive sim philosophy that let players approach every encounter their own way. Strip the Thief and Blade Runner labels off and you can still see both projects bleeding through Dunwall's plague-ridden streets. The supernatural assassin powers, the dystopian atmosphere, the emphasis on player choice over scripted spectacle. Dishonored didn't just replace those games. It absorbed them.

Smith's description of the Blade Runner prototype is the detail that sticks with me most. Arkane had its first-person combat animator working on Replicant fighting styles informed by Doug Church's observation that Replicants would move in ways humans physically couldn't. Flips, impossible reflexes, casual disregard for pain. "The story pitch we had for Blade Runner was just, I loved it," Smith said, trailing off without elaborating. I desperately want to know what that pitch was, and I suspect I never will.

We did eventually get a Thief 4, of course. Eidos Montreal shipped one in 2014, and it landed with the enthusiasm of a damp napkin. The series has been dormant since, with only the recently released spiritual successor Thick as Thieves attempting to fill the gap. An Arkane-made Thief sequel, built by developers who clearly worshipped the original trilogy, would have been a different proposition. Whether it would have been better than Dishonored is impossible to say, but I think the immersive sim genre is richer for the path Arkane was forced to take.

The YouTube series is planned as a multi-part project, with Colantonio and Smith being joined by other members of the original Dishonored development team in future episodes. Smith continued working at Arkane Austin until Microsoft shut the studio down. Colantonio founded WolfEye Studios, which is currently developing an unannounced first-person immersive sim. Arkane Lyon, the surviving branch, is working on Marvel's Blade.