Actually, you can still play it on modern versions of Windows. Thank GoG for that :)

1. Buy Thief Gold from GoG ($9.99) [1].

2. Install this [2] community patch to downgrade it to The Dark Project.

3. Enjoy!

Always look for any old games on GoG first. If you can't find a game there, you'll definitely find it on either retro gaming forums or private torrent trackers.

[1]: https://www.gog.com/game/thief_gold

[2]: http://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=140679

You can. At some point someone (probably one of the original devs) released anonymously a vastly updated version of the Dark Engine that Thief (and Thief 2 and System Shock 2) used that not only fixed any issues of the original but added several QoL improvements like antialiasing, raw mouse input, widescreen support, etc and since then he makes sporadic updates. Look for NewDark.

Sadly AFAIK he's still doing that anonymously through a french forum or something, probably because legally he shouldn't have the code. Despite that all modern re-releases of the games that used the Dark Engine (like those on Steam and GOG) are based on NewDark instead of the original engine.

I remember when the first NewDark patch dropped - the collective response of the community was "What the *?" (in the best way).

And even games not all that old. I'm currently replaying Fallout 3 (from 2008) just fine under Wine. It really is amazingly smooth -- almost as if it were a native game.

2008 is literally 9 years old, all the current day titles I look up are basically rated "Garbage". I think this will improve though as the move to Vulcan and DX12 should make porting easier as the APIs are more similar I believe. The most recent big name thing I could find was WoW - which, while originally from 2003(?) is actively updated and has had some pretty substantial graphical improvements in more recent expansions.

How could miss the top 10 platinum ? it is literally on the landing page of the Wine applications database[1]. It has left 4 dead, Team Fortress 2, Civilization 4, etc. More recent than World of Warcraft which is only rated gold. Then the Gold list has starcraft 2 (Wings of Liberty, Heart of the Swarm, and Legacy of the Void), the sims 3, Final Fantasy XIV, Fallout 3,...

Though none of these are current day, they are not old games.

[1]: https://appdb.winehq.org/

Yeah, those games are about as old or older than FO3.

WoW at least has had a recent update (including a basically total graphics engine rewrite last year, switching to a deferred pipeline, etc) and still runs well - I'd call it more recent, but maybe that's just me.

The rumour is that Blizard has a sort-of-unofficial support for wine for some of their applications and they at least try not to break it on each update.

I ran No Man's Sky without problems. It's an OpenGL game so there are fewer incompatibility issues.

I'm running Skyrim (2011) flawlessly under wine (well as flawlessly as it run in windows at least), including expansions and mods.

The only issue is that on exit to desktop the game hangs and needs to be manually killed.

The new DX11-only re-release doesn't work though.

Just want to add that yeah, Thief is such a good game. If by chance the developers are reading this message board, thanks!