Gaming

Tom Clancy: video game author

How a novelist conquered computers

Posted: 10 November 2008, 11:11

By Richard Dotor

Tom Clancy is one of the world’s most successful authors, penning novel after novel about the world of international espionage and army tech. His books have sold millions and Clancy himself is one of only two authors to have sold two million copies of a book on first printing, ever. He's so big in fact, that In March this year games publisher Ubisoft snapped up all of the intellectual property rights to his work - if books can be movies, why can't they be games?

Tom Clancy’s novels have long enjoyed success on the big screen with films like The Hunt for Red October and the Jack Ryan series of movies, but Clancy, not content with having conquered the literary and movie fields, co-founded a video game development studio called Red Storm Entertainment in 1996. Two years later Red Storm released the first in the long running Rainbow Six games, based on Clancy’s books. In 2000 Ubisoft bought Red Storm and began a partnership that has produced three of the most popular franchises in video gaming history, Ghost Recon, Rainbow Six and Splinter Cell. 

Players of these franchises will be familiar with their squad based gameplay, realistic gun fights, attention to detail and futuristic design. In Ghost Recon you control the Ghosts, a group of well armed and technologically integrated next generation soldiers. Rainbow Six, now on its nineteenth release, has been one of video gaming’s biggest franchises and has seen Ding Chavez and his team go from the Jungles of Brazil to the casinos of Las Vegas in their effort to take out terrorists.

Tactics took a change for Ubisoft and Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell project: here, the responsibility was on one man, Sam Fisher. Rather than engaging in well orchestrated gun fights, the player’s method of attack is stealth. Fisher is a one man army, using tranquilizer guns, lock picks, electric shocks and sticky cameras to move silently through terrorist compounds, stalk them in the shadows and then at the right moment take them out with deadly efficiency. 

But what about the future? At a recent event where Ubisoft was showing off the next step in its range of Tom Clancy products. Next year sees the release of futuristic flight sim Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X. Set in the world of Ghost Recon, H.A.W.X. will have you engaging in the same scenarios as your men on the ground, only in the latest in flight technology.

Most promising of all though is the imminent release of Tom Clancy’s EndWar, a real time strategy game where you order units of infantry, tanks and aircraft around a battle field in an effort to defeat an enemy either as part of the story or on-line. EndWar is a console game though, and to move away from the traditionally complicated control methods of this genre, developer Ubisoft Shanghai has streamlined all its controls into simple voice commands made through a head set. Five minutes of play time with EndWar and you lose yourself in it, quickly barking into the microphone “unit 3 attack target, unit 2 move to target, deploy gunships, LAUNCH WMD!” EndWar’s innovations don’t end there though. When players take the game on-line they will be contributing to a persistent war going on between the three factions in the game, the Russians, the Europeans and the United States. Armageddon has never been so exciting!

EndWar is out now for the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3. A demo for EndWar is available now on Xbox Live Marketplace. 

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