Thieves' Guild

Title screen from Thieves' Guild (using an Atari ST VT-52 terminal)

Thieves' Guild is a multi-player strategy door game for Atari ST and PC-compatible bulletin board systems. In Thieves' Guild, players explore a large medieval world, and advance through thievery, spellcasting, and combat. There are 25 different towns to discover and explore, each with a unique feature.

Like many other BBS door games, Thieves' Guild is asynchronous. Gameplay is turn-based, with a set amount of time available to play each day.

Paul Witte of Mythyn Software began working on Thieves' Guild in 1988. According to the documentation for an earlier Mythyn game called "Sysop Versus User Arcade," the public release of Thieves Guild was scheduled for summer 1990.

Title screen from Thieves' Guild front-end client for the Atari ST

Robert Fletcher and Herb Flower developed a graphical front-end client for Thieves' Guild for the Atari ST. The pixel-art graphics for this client are surprisingly detailed, and among the best of any other BBS door game. The front-end also includes sound clips and limited animation.

An image of a printed map meant to accompany Thieves' Guild

Thieves' Guild is also unusual among BBS games in that a printed map was available for purchase from Mythyn Software. The map was drawn by Flower, and detailed all the locations users could find in the game.

Myron Crandall ported Thieves' Guild to the PC in Turbo Pascal. His port appears to have been completed in 1995, but it was never distributed. Josh Renaud recovered the source code to this port, as well as the original Atari ST version, in 2020.

Break Into Chat blog articles

• I completed my 7-year quest to play Thieves' Guild (in-depth analysis)
• Paul Witte and Herb Flower, creators of Thieves' Guild (interview)
• Hatari, Lantronix, and CosmosEx: My quixotic quest to play “Thieves Guild”

Downloads

• Thieves' Guild (Atari ST)
• Thieves' Guild emulator/front-end (Atari ST)
• Set of files to enable local play of TG (Atari ST)

External links

• Mythyn source code repository - Contains source code for multiple versions of Thieves' Guild, as well as other door programs written by Paul Witte