Kill me, American – Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell

**Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell** (Ubi Soft, PlayStation 2, 2002/2003)

Culture abhors a vacuum. Often, if you don’t make an expected sequel, someone else will. The band Muse’s early success before they went full Queen was based in part on the gap left when Radiohead ventured ever further from traditional rock. The lack of a proper follow-up to GoldenEye 007 helped make space for the success of TimeSplitters. And as brilliant and successful as Metal Gear Solid 2 was, its absolute refusal to live up to expectations left an opportunity for a game that would provide cool stealth gameplay but with cutscenes reined in a bit and less narrative complexity in general. Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell inserted itself into that gap like a guy high up in a corridor with one foot on each wall.

Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell’s over-the-shoulder view and drop-down-list activity selection interface are both more Hitman than Metal Gear Solid, but its agent Sam Fisher, from a fictional branch of the US National Security Agency, is otherwise very much more Solid Snake. From his array of gadgets and physical moves to keep out of sight and take out enemies unseen to his gruff turn on radio communications, there’s a clear inspiration. Even the music comes pretty close to the same detection rhumba. And he’s soon just as caught up in the consequences of high level political conspiracy.

To get the positives in first, there is a lot to enjoy in playing through Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell’s challenges. Sam Fisher’s movements are pretty slick and extensive. While its settings are mostly theoretically more open than Metal Gear Solid’s, they are in reality even more linear, with the route ahead generally pretty obvious, whether others are blocked by locked doors or carefully positioned fires. That allows for an even more regular flow of flashy set-pieces while still often managing to offer different realistic possibilities for making your way through, from careful hiding to shooting everything that poses a problem. And Ubisoft added some bright new ideas to the template.

The big one concerns brightness. You constantly have a meter on screen showing your visibility. Like the rest of Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell’s UI, the fact that it’s presented in Palm Pilot LCD monochrome dates it terribly, but functionally it’s great. You can creep up on people by staying in the shadows, and that includes by shooting out the lights and turning on your night-vision goggles. Which effectively means playing much of the game in black-and-white, but it’s a visual effect which adds more than it loses, not least in atmosphere. I love when games lend themselves to exploring a whole new way of thinking about spaces, in spaces well designed for the purpose, and Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell excels at that. The PS2 version, which reached a much bigger audience than the Xbox original, has some extra compromises but is still technically impressive.

It’s the story that reaches further into simplicity, or at least a simple kind of complexity. Tom Clancy provided his reassuring badge to let players know exactly what kind of thriller to expect (Tom Clancy did not personally write any of this). And the other bit of timing worth noting aside from Metal Gear Solid 2 is the TV show 24, which started in 2001 and was enjoying great success. Sam Fisher works for a different fictional American agency to 24’s Jack Bauer (Third Echelon versus Bauer’s Counter Terrorist Unit) but the message is much the same. The United States is in imminent danger from assorted devious foreign threats, in this case from Georgia and China. Horrific consequences can only be prevented by one man knocking people out, using fully authorised lethal force, and setting up some ‘interrogations’. The use of drugs as part of these is explicitly referenced, Geneva Convention be damned. Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell presents all of its interferences in other countries, up to embedding agents in their governments, as not just good, but necessary.

Meanwhile, the government with the biggest input into the game wasn’t the American one. Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell is notable as the entry point for a major player in our story, then known as Ubi Soft. Specifically, it was developed by a fairly new subsidiary of the French developer and publisher, Ubi Soft Montréal, which was set up in 1997. The decision to set up in Montréal rather than Boston or elsewhere was informed by significant funding from both Quebec’s provincial government and the federal Canadian government, which between them gave Ubi Soft tens of thousands of dollars for each new employee. The funding was spread over five years, long enough to cover some initial minor games to get in the swing of things and the development of the studio’s first big hit. Which means that Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell is essentially propaganda for the United States National Security Agency heavily funded by a foreign government. Still, as we’ll get to explore at length, Ubi Soft have long maintained that they don’t make political games.