Thief’s Garrett Gets His Original Voice Back After 22 Years. Stephen Russell Says His Voice Has Dropped Since 1997
Stephen Russell first gave Garrett his whisper in 1997. Now he’s back as the master thief for The Tarnished Mirror, a new four-mission campaign that ships with Nightdive Studios’ Thief: The Dark Project Remastered on 3 December. It’s his first time in the hood since 2004, and he says the tricky part wasn’t the character. It was his own voice catching up with the years.
Russell confirmed the return on Deep Dive, the podcast Nightdive posts on its YouTube channel, in a long conversation about how a stage actor who mostly read medical scripts ended up as one of gaming’s best-known voices. He didn’t hide his delight. “I love doing that character… It’s so much fun,” he said.
Players have already heard a taste. Nightdive’s reveal trailer for The Tarnished Mirror is a minute of fog, mirrors and torchlit stone, and then Garrett gets the last word: one dry, pleased line in the voice that walked players through 1998, a little lower now.
Hear the voice: Stephen Russell’s Garrett has the final line of The Tarnished Mirror reveal trailer (just before 1:00). Video: Nightdive Studios, on YouTube
The expansion comes from the people who made The Black Parade, a much loved fan campaign for the original game. According to its Steam listing, it picks up after the Trickster’s defeat, with Garrett dragged into a conspiracy after he steals a Precursor hand mirror. Russell recorded new lines for it, the first new Garrett dialogue in more than two decades.
From medical reads to a whisper
Before Thief, Russell was a theater actor first. On the podcast he explained that his voiceover work at the time was mostly medical narration, about as far from a gothic heist game as a recording booth gets, as 80 Level reported in its write-up of the episode.
Garrett’s voice started as an attempt at Clint Eastwood: quiet, whispery, never projected. Russell also remembered being shown an early build of the game by its makers at Looking Glass Studios and feeling “the incredible claustrophobia they had created,” as he put it in comments GamingBolt reported. That claustrophobia is still what people remember about Thief, and his voice is a big part of it.
Garrett was his first video game role. He kept it for Thief II: The Metal Age in 2000, where he voiced both Garrett and the villain Karras, and again for Thief: Deadly Shadows in 2004.
The reboot that went another way
When Eidos-Montréal rebooted the series as Thief in 2014, Garrett got a new actor, Romano Orzari. The studio’s reason, as recorded on Russell’s Wikipedia page, was that the reboot’s motion capture approach needed the Garrett actor to perform his own stunts.
Russell’s career didn’t slow down. Fallout 4 players know him as Codsworth, Nick Valentine and every Mister Handy in the Commonwealth. Skyrim players know him as Mercer Frey, Clavicus Vile and Barbas the talking dog, and Dishonored 2 players heard him as Corvo Attano. Plenty of players have spent hours with his voice without ever knowing his name.
Twenty-two years later, a lower Garrett
Coming back to a role after decades has a catch: the audience still has the old recordings in their ears, and here they ship in the same package as the new ones. Russell told the podcast it had been almost 30 years since he first voiced Garrett, and that “the equipment changes,” as PC Gamer quoted him.
The bigger change was in the man at the mic. “I think my voice has dropped since 1997, so I needed to be conscious of pitch,” he said, in remarks Shacknews carried. 80 Level adds that he also adjusted for a slower delivery, the other thing that creeps into a voice with age.
It’s the same problem CD Projekt faced this week with Geralt’s Polish voice, and the two studios solved it in opposite ways. CD Projekt is using AI to match Jacek Rozenek’s new lines to his 2015 sound after a stroke changed his voice. Nightdive’s Garrett is simply Russell himself, 29 years on, minding his pitch.
What else is in the box
The remaster itself runs on Nightdive’s KEX Engine, with visuals up to 4K at 120 frames a second, gamepad support with rumble and gyro aiming, a weapon and item wheel, a mission selector and a Vault of behind the scenes material, according to the Steam page. It also has built-in support for custom campaigns, a big deal for a series that fans have kept alive with their own missions for more than two decades.
Image: Nightdive Studios and Atari, via Steam
The package includes the original game plus the extra missions from the Thief Gold re-release, and GamingBolt lists it for PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch and Nintendo Switch 2. Steam shows 3 December as the release date.
Russell is a fan of the new writing. “I feel like the writing this time around is just as strong as the first time and honors what was created originally,” he said. His verdict on the whole experience fit in a few words: “great to be back with the old guy.”
VoiceEditSuiteYour breath. Your pace. Your edit.Auto Clean Up learns your pace from every file and puts your own pause back wherever it cuts a mistake.See how it worksLearns from numbers, never your audio. Never used to train AI.The story of a fan team getting the keys to an official expansion seemed to strike a chord with him, too. Talking about small, scrappy game teams, he went back to where he started. “Having got my start as an actor in community theater, it felt very familiar,” he said, before summing up the feeling: “You’re not painting the sets today, today you’re playing the lead role!”
Sources: Nightdive Studios, Deep Dive podcast with Stephen Russell (YouTube), Shacknews, GamingBolt, PC Gamer, 80 Level, Steam (Thief: The Dark Project Remastered listing), Wikipedia (Stephen Russell). Images: Nightdive Studios and Atari; photo of Stephen Russell by Super Festivals, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Lee este artículo en español: El Garrett de Thief recupera su voz original 22 años después. Stephen Russell dice que su voz bajó desde 1997
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