✪ A History of Tom Clancy's Realistic Tactical Shooters (Ghost Recon & Rainbow 6)
79http://www.ign.com/articles/2012/01/17/the-history-of-tom-clancy-games
The Planning Stage
It all started, of course, with Tom Clancy himself. He was a fan of The Colony, an innovative early first-person shooter written by a programmer named David Smith. Clancy loved the game so much that he invested in Smith's 3D tools company Virtus, and together they started hammering out a new game. That game was SSN, a submarine simulator that would tie in to Clancy's upcoming novel of the same name. When it came time to flesh out the design details, Clancy made the natural choice: he called his old friend (and later best man) Commodore Doug Littlejohns, a decorated Royal Navy submarine commander with an eye for detail. The resulting game was developed in just nine months, and the results were good enough to convince Clancy that he wanted a game company of his own. Littlejohns was again the obvious choice to lead, and in 1996, the Commodore uprooted his family and crossed the pond to North Carolina. Red Storm was born.
"The initial days of Red Storm were crazy," recalls Brian Upton, then the lead engineer and designer on Rainbow Six and currently a Senior Game Designer at Sony Studios Santa Monica. "We were all very inexperienced and in completely over our heads." With Littlejohns at the helm, the studio left port with no less than four games in development. The Commodore kept things in line by running the studio like a submarine, a low-protocol, high-discipline style that kept the studio on a methodical track but lacked patience for the iterative process of design. "[Littlejohns] always seemed frustrated that we couldn't just get it right the first time," Upton says.
Despite these teething pains, Red Storm accomplished the feat of shipping three of its four promised games—only "futuristic combat rodeo game" Planet Texas was cancelled. Of the others, Tom Clancy's Politika was an unambitious translation of a tepidly received board game, and it was excoriated by the market. Dominant Species had little if anything to do with Clancy, and was not particularly successful. It was the third game that lit the way forward for Red Storm and showcased the style that would define Tom Clancy games for over a decade. That game was Rainbow Six.
Originally conceived by Mustafa "Moose" Thamer at a three-day brainstorming retreat with Clancy, Rainbow Six was designed explicitly to eschew the twitch-based gameplay of the era's Quake clones. Based on the real-life exploits of the FBI's Hostage Rescue Team, this was to be a game where you could bleed out from a single bullet wound. Reflexes would rarely play a role in victory. Instead, success would come from careful operations, selection of ordnance, and the Planning Stage, a pre-battle strategizing session that let you lay out the positions and pathing of your computer-controlled operatives. It was too robust a design to stay merely in the realm of hostage rescue, and eventually grew to encompass a variety of counter-terrorist activities.
It wasn't easy getting there, though. "We were trying to make four games simultaneously and had completely underestimated the workload," Upton explains. "As the schedule started slipping we went into permanent crunch. Frank Boosman, our head of production and one of the principal founders, was let go halfway through production. I pretty much expected the whole thing to implode at any moment.
"However, at the same time, the excitement level on the team for Rainbow Six was steadily growing. I remember one great moment where we were testing multiplayer and two players walked into a room and started blasting away, completely missing each other. Then one of them held still, waited for his targeting reticle to settle, and got a one-shot kill with a perfect headshot. That was when we knew we had a completely different shooter experience on our hands."
Stuart White, currently the Senior Producer on Ghost Recon: Future Soldier, was a tech support representative at Red Storm at the time. He, too, remembers these last incredible moments when Rainbow Six came together. "I've said it before, I'll say it again," he told us. "It was an experience unlike anything else."
The hard work and impossible hours paid off. The result was a brutally challenging yet remarkably playable "thinking man's shooter" that was leagues ahead of the other "realistic" military games of the '90s. "To this day I still haven't seen anything like it," White notes, "as far as a combination of action and strategy. It allowed the player who was really into just action to have an experience that they wanted. Or, if you wanted to be a strategy guy, you could actually sit there for like two hours and make these detailed plans with go codes." With two disparate groups of players enamored, Red Storm was secure, and Tom Clancy's gaming legacy was born.
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