{"id":1440750,"date":"2025-12-27T04:18:17","date_gmt":"2025-12-27T04:18:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/hiipeFKcWLdheitYUPqqo8"},"modified":"2025-12-27T04:18:17","modified_gmt":"2025-12-27T04:18:17","slug":"an-innocuous-video-about-how-fromsoft-protagonists-are-5-feet-7-inches-tall-led-to-me-becoming-weirdly-fixated-about-videogame-character-height-this-year","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/arcader.org\/news\/an-innocuous-video-about-how-fromsoft-protagonists-are-5-feet-7-inches-tall-led-to-me-becoming-weirdly-fixated-about-videogame-character-height-this-year\/","title":{"rendered":"An innocuous video about how FromSoft protagonists are 5 feet 7 inches tall led to me becoming weirdly fixated about videogame character height this year"},"content":{"rendered":"
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2025 was a year of highs and lows for me. Not for personal or professional reasons, but rather because I got weirdly obsessed with the height of videogame characters. It started with the surprising revelation<\/a> that every FromSoftware protagonist outside of Elden Ring Nightreign<\/a> is exactly 5’7″, a fact I learned from a YouTube investigation<\/a> by FromSoft savant Zullie the Witch.<\/p>\n

I’d always assumed FromSoftware protagonists were taller than this. I’m not sure why, but it’s probably due to how Anglo-American entertainment media has programmed my brain to perceive heroic archetypes as tall, dark and handsome. So finding out that all FromSoft’s dodge-rolling warriors are the same height as me was surprising, leading me to think more deeply about how we represent height in games.<\/p>\n

Some of this manifested in bizarre tangents, like when I bugged Arkane Studios level designer and The Black Parade<\/a> director Romain Barrilliot to help me figure out the height of Garrett from Thief. Interestingly, it turns out that Garrett’s height varies across the games. He’s exactly six feet tall in Thief: The Dark Project<\/a>, slightly taller in Thief 2: The Metal Age<\/a> (though this extra couple of inches may be purely cosmetic) and a significantly shorter 5’5″ in 2014’s Thief reboot<\/a>.<\/p>\n

This is entirely beside the point, but it should be noted that Garrett is also a giant poo-coloured cuboid in the original Thief. Since we never see <\/em>Garrett during play, Looking Glass never bothered to give him a proper character model. Little wonder the guards are so shocked when they discover him skulking around.<\/p>\n

I guess we don’t think about videogame character height much because the world is typically built relative to that <\/em>height, even when the two are deliberately out of whack. For example, Quake’s avatar Ranger is a puny 3’5″ inches tall, which makes its levels seem huge and foreboding as you rattle through them.<\/p>\n

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