Keef the Thief

Keef the Thief: A Boy and His Lockpick is a video game designed by Naughty Dog and published by Electronic Arts. The game was released in 1989 for the Apple IIGS and then later ported to the Amiga and MS-DOS.

Development
In the 80's, developers desired to work with Electronic Arts; Naughty Dog became the youngest third party studio to contract with the publisher. The developers acted like " wild, loud kids " at the hotel where EA held its developer's conferences.

Naughty Dog recalled: "While we were making it, Andy entered sarcastic text as a place holder for what we believed would be the real text in the final release. EA liked the humor so much that they decided to make the entire game a comedy."

The consequence of this humor on the sales was "no joke", however. It was around this time that the company name was changed to "Naughty Dog", a rebranding move to shed old history.

Plot and gameplay
Keef the Thief is a classic sword and sorcery role-playing game.

Reception
The Amiga and Apple IIGS versions of the game were reviewed in 1990 in Dragon #157 by Hartley, Patricia, and Kirk Lesser in "The Role of Computers" column. The reviewers normally gave a game a rating from 1 to 5 stars, but they gave the Apple II version of this game an "X" for "Not recommended" because of its antiquated copy-protection system.