THE MAKING OF Tom Clancy’s SPLINTER CELL

Is there such a thing as a happy accident when it comes to videogame development? Is it possible for developers – who work on their games for years at a time – to simply land butter-side-up without any planning or intention? Different developers would have varied opinions on that, but it’s hard to discount the numerous times that classic games have been born from an idea that was heading down a completely different route. Grand Theft Auto was famously a game about street racing when a glitch that caused the cops to aggressively ram the player off the road took it down a different path. Pikmin started life as a tech demo for the GameCube, with numerous Marios hopping and bounding about the stage that impressed so much, the concept became a game of its own. Even the fighting game genre as we know it spawned from a bug in Street Fighter II that allowed players to pull off combo attacks if they were skilled enough. Happy accidents can lead to great things, and in many ways that’s the story of Splinter Cell – a game that began life as something completely different.

“The game was supposed to be a revolutionary title that was a blend between two types of gameplay,” explains François Coulon of how the game originally began development. “You would have a strategy core layer where you would see something from above, like a map [in] Warcraft II, and then you could go into any unit and play