Help, I can’t stop listening to audio loops from the Thief games on repeat
Beats to stalk and steal to.
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
The ambience of Looking Glass Studios' Thief games was without compare. Eric Brosius and everyone else who contributed to their soundscapes knocked it out of the park. The echoing tunnels, the religious chants, the distant buzz of industry, the whine of electric coils, the inexplicable all-permeating hum in the darkness, and that one banging DJ Shadow-esque tune that blares when you enter the Downwind Guild. It’s all perfect.
And now I’ve discovered it’s all on YouTube, and has been looped. Some of the videos are shorter, like one that takes thecutscene music from the intro to the Assassins levelof Thief: The Dark Project, which Garrett normally narrates over, and loops it before that part so we can hear it separate from the voiceover. That only goes for two-and-a-half minutes. If you prefer the ambience of Thief 2, here’s two of its atmospheric audio files,s01mel1.wav and s01mel2.wav, looped for an hour.
YouTubers have gone further than that, of course. Which is why I’ve spent a significant chunk of today listening to a somber10-hour loop of the Horn of Quintusfrom Down in the Bonehoard.
If you’re not familiar with the 10-hour trend, back in 2011 when YouTube first expanded its video-duration limit the internet briefly went wild for a 10-hour loop of Nyan Cat. Now you can listen to hours and hours of anything, including the tinnyPortal radio version of Still Alive, and theTristram theme from Diablo.
Because I’m easily distracted and have tinnitus, I often play instrumental music while I work. Today, my copy of Mogwai’s score for Les Revenants has gone unheard. Instead, I’ve been listening to anhour-long loop of loloop2.wav, which I believe is the noise of those Tesla-coil electrical generator things in the haunted mines under Cragscleft Prison, and a 10-hour loop of theambient sounds and muttering guardfrom Thief 2’s Running Interference mission.
I’m a little concerned about the potential long-term side effects of this. What if I start reciting cynical monologues to myself or crouch-walking everywhere I go?
If you’d like to know something more practical about Thief’s audio, YouTube can help there as well. The Python Blue channel has been excavating some of its sources, finding the origin of various noises sampled in Thief: The Dark Project among thepresets of the Korg M1 synthesizer’s Virtual Studio Technology software, as well as theEarshot SFX sound effect library and other sources, including Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki’sStabat Mater, which provided some of the choral chanting, and a haunting track from 2001: A Space Odyssey called Lux Aeterna. Which, naturally enough, you can find an hour-long loop of on YouTube.
The biggest gaming news, reviews and hardware deals
Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team.
Jody’s first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia’s first radio show about videogames,Zed Games. He’s written forRock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue,GamesRadar,Zam,Glixel,Five Out of Ten Magazine, andPlayboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody’s first article for PC Gamer was about theaudio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he’s written aboutwhy Silent Hill belongs on PC,why Recettear: An Item Shop’s Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, andhow weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.
20 years later, Konami just finally revealed who played Eva in MGS3 and how she acted making out with Naked Snake
The ex-GTA lead whose blog got the kibosh from Rockstar chats San Andreas' worst bug and why ‘anything that isn’t visible to players tends to have swearing in it’
Blizzard veteran David Kim’s strategy comeback with Battle Aces is ‘very personal:’ ‘I just can’t accept… the end-all peak of RTS is StarCraft 2 and nothing can ever be better’
