3/3/2024 0 Comments Splinter cell 5The Drift was too ambitious for the inexperienced team at Ubisoft New York. And I think, ultimately, that’s what killed the project.” "But, of course, the problem is that you can’t really just combine a whole bunch of gameplay mechanics and have it be cohesive. “The idea was that we could probably just pick the best gameplay mechanics and combine them into a game, and that would be The Drift," Byrne says. The game’s protagonist wielded a hefty gun with an attached TV monitor, a manually winding winch grapple, and an old-school switchboard used to control its main feature: a video feed to take advantage of various vision augmentations and remote projectile cameras.ĭynamic, emergent, stylish – The Drift was supposed to be it all. Populating giant airborne islands were retro-futuristic buildings, flying cars, clunky analog gadgets, and dynamically reactive crowds. In it, Earth had burst apart, the remains of civilization built atop the floating vestiges suspended high in the sky. ![]() “In a sea of kid-friendly games, The Drift was the more mature sci-fi project that caught my attention immediately,” writes lead character artist Martin Caya in an email interview. It brought the beginnings of its new game, The Drift. In early 1999, Gerard Guillemot sent Coulon’s team to New York. It did the trick the idea was greenlit with a small crew. Upper management hadn’t shown much interest in the genre before, but Coulon convinced Ubisoft co-founder Yves Guillemot to give it a chance after showing him some scenes from Metal Gear Solid. In the mind of a French artist dreaming up a world of floating islands, in a Paris boardroom over a game of Metal Gear Solid, in the offices of a North Carolinian animation tool company taking its first steps into a new medium.Įarlier that year, Francois Coulon, eventual associate producer and creative director of Splinter Cell, was heading up a team in Paris to develop Ubisoft’s first shooter. They came together only incidentally, through decisions and events happening separately and without connection. Like any sufficiently complex video game, the seeds of its creation sprouted first in several different places. The story of Splinter Cell contains many such alignments, not the least of which is the unlikely pairing of, as Byrne recalls laughingly, “a bunch of bleeding heart liberals” and Clancy. “Seen from the inside, every game is a miracle,” writes creative lead Francois Coulon in an email interview. That it helped cement a burgeoning genre and remained one of the top-selling Xbox titles for the console’s life is even more so. That a studio like Ubisoft Montreal circa 2002, still largely unproven outside of its work on licensed, kid-friendly games, could make a standout title in a genre it had never worked with, using a license much of the staff didn’t care for, with a team made up mostly of completely inexperienced developers is remarkable. Had Clancy shown any interest in the project, he may have objected, but Ubisoft Montreal’s work was in his periphery at best. “It was almost to the point where we just threw in all of these tropes to see what we could get away with,” Byrne said, “and every time we added more tropes, the more Clancy-like it became.” Petty, who wrote the script: “He was a sandal-wearing, vegan, NYU student.” Not at all the kind of guy who would keep a shelf of Jack Reacher novels. And when I told them this story, they were like, ‘Wait a minute, wait a minute, Splinter Cell was ironic? It was an ironic Clancy game?’”īyrne recounted his memory of J.T. “One time I was having lunch with the guys from PAX,” says Ed Byrne, lead level designer, “and they were big fans of Splinter Cell. But in fact, his wry, ironic wit and detached sarcasm point to more than just the tropes informing his character – they betray the fact that his creators couldn’t be further from Clancy’s type. With two decades of distance, it’s hard to see the defacto mascot of novelist Tom Clancy’s video game offshoot brand as anything other than the embodiment of its ethos the avatar of Clancy’s own stable of globe-trotting, no-nonsense, flag-waving heroes. Nonetheless, Fisher was once the lead of a game momentous enough to compete for sales with Halo, have Hideo Kojima’s Metal Gear Solid team taking notes, and find itself referenced as the graphical and technical benchmark of the early Xbox years. But by most measures, the franchise has been dormant for a decade. And there is a remake on the way – of which we’ve only seen concept art. In the years since Sam Fisher’s last outing, 2013’s Splinter Cell: Blacklist, he’s made a handful of cameo appearances and even shown his battle-worn visage at a conference or two.
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