One thing I’ve learned in journalism is that the stupidest questions can lead to the most fascinating answers, if only because nobody else would be such a colossal dumbass to consider asking them. This proved true recently as I sought an answer to an extremely silly question: How tall is Garrett, the protagonist of the Thief series of stealth games?
Why did I want to answer this question? The truth is it’s been bugging me for years, ever since I read online that Garrett is canonically six feet tall. Having always imagined Garrett to be considerably shorter than six feet, this figure has never sat right with me.
This may be because I am 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 slightly shorter or a similar height to Garrett, some, like the Hammerites, are significantly taller, suggesting that Garrett is of average height at best. And if you Google what the global average height for men is, you basically get me, so it’s a reasonable assumption that Garrett would be around my height.
Anyway, I let the subject be for a long time, as slightly more important things were happening like a global pandemic. But writing a story about the height of Elden Ring: Nightreign characters caused the question to arise again, stepping out of the shadows of my mind wielding the blackjack of curiosity. When I looked into it a second time, I got an entirely different answer, one that claims Garrett is 5’5″, even shorter than I’d previously 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″ figure is not for the original Garrett, but the Garrett depicted in Eidos Montreal’s 2014 reboot.
A Tumblr blogger going by Haethel calculated reboot Garrett’s height by comparing his size to another character in the game, whose height is listed in the game’s artbook as being 6’7″. Haethel’s calculation seems accurate, but since the reboot’s Garrett is not the original Garrett, it’s a moot point.
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 way up to 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 back to you with a more precise answer in a few hours but Garrett is indeed 6 feet tall in T1 and probably T2 as well.”
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 thing selected on the left is a 6ft tall brush,” Barrilliot explains. “Each square is 2ft, which equals 32 pixels on a scale 16 texture (which is the default scale) the texture itself being 64×64 pixels. Immediately right of the brush is Garrett in Thief 1. This model is called playbox and is never seen at all during 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 exactly 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 right we have T2 Garrett, as seen during gameplay when 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 actually taller than T1 Garrett, though I think it’s only cosmetic. However, if we want to go with his canonical representation as opposed to the magnificent specimen in the middle, then Garrett is in fact 6’5.3″ to be exact.” Barrilliot provides another image comparing Garrett’s height with a 6’5″ brush, noting that Garrett’s model is “a little 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 thing is that some other NPCs such as Hammerite dwarf him,” Barrilliot says. “I guess everyone in The City has eaten a lot of soup when they were young.”
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 is very standardized,” he replied. “As I said, 2ft equals 32px on scale 16, so if you want to use, say, Quake/Half-Life units, you only need to replace feet with pixels to get your metrics. A doorway in Thief is usually 4x8ft, which makes it 64×128 in Quake/HL units.”
While explaining this, Barrilliot points out that Garrett stands head, shoulders and possibly hips above Quake’s playable character Ranger.” Garrett is a lot taller than Ranger, who is ~56 Quake units tall. “That makes him a ridiculous 3’5″ tall at best,” Barrilliot says. “The first thing that shocked me when I played Thief for the first time was how damn tall Garrett was in comparison to Ranger, who’s definitely a short king.”
So not only do we have a definitive answer for Garrett’s height (which is that it definitively varies from game to game), but we also know that Garrett could bundle Quake’s protagonist into his swag sack if he felt so inclined. It’s as the saying goes, ask a stupid question, get a supremely intelligent and detailed answer.