Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six: Vegas [PS3]

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With The Hunt For Red October, Tom Clancy burst unexpectedly onto the bestseller scene in 1984. A folksy endorsement of the book from President Ronald Reagan didn't hurt. Clancy's brand of ultra-detailed military action was perfect for the rapidly warming cold-war climate, and as the Iron Curtain fell the writer's fortunes rose. A rapidly expanding line of Jack Ryan novels, together with a few successful film adaptations, entrenched Clancy in mainstream media as the thinking man's source for thrills.

Gaming was just gaining ground as Clancy developed his universe, but in 1996 he formed Red Storm Entertainment with former Red Storm Rising advisor Doug Littlejohn as the company's president. Their first game was the Risk clone Politika, but the debut of Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six quickly followed, timed to release with the novel of the same name.

At that point, Clancy and the development team worked closely together. The game and novel are tightly related, with plot points and characters developed by Clancy and passed to the dev team.

Since Ubisoft's acquisition of Red Storm Entertainment in 2000 and Doug Littlejohn's departure, it's been difficult to ascertain exactly how much hands-on work the author does with the games that bear his name and inflate his bank account.

In 2003, Splinter Cell producer Domitille Doat told IGN, "Tom Clancy is involved at every level of development." According to Doat, Clancy "he must approve the concept. Then he checks regularly to see that the game is developing in a way that is consistent with his vision and brand. Finally, he sees the finished product and gives us the thumbs up."

But what does 'involvement' really mean? Without stealing into Ubisoft's offices to rifle through their email archives in search of Clancy communiques, we have to settle for the conclusion that the writer's input might be limited more to giving that thumbs up or down than anything else, and asking for more realistic detail when possible.

Despite claims to serious attention paid during the development process, Splinter Cell was concocted and written entirely by the development team. The series only bears the Clancy name, and the related novels were actually ghostwritten by at least two different authors under the pseudonym David Michaels.

That said, his influence on popular culture is impossible to deny; the detail-obsessive military procedural has always been around, but he took it to new levels. Books like The Hunt For Red October and Clear and Present Danger whet the mass appetite for the Clancy formula, without which mega-franchises like Rainbow Six and Splinter Cell couldn't exist.