Hall of Classics: Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six

In 1998 bestselling political thriller author Tom Clancy launched a small multimedia empire with the unprecedented simultaneous release of his novelist Rainbow Six and its companion video game of the same name. They were sandwiched in between two novels revolving around Clancy's recurring hero Jack Ryan. There's currently a movie adaptation of the franchise rumored to be on the docket for 2010 and there's not a doubt in my mind that the big screen adaptation owes more to the success of the Rainbow Six video games than to the original novel. For the past ten years the RS series has been a fixture of console and PC gaming thanks to the revolutionary design of the stunning original.

In 1998, Rainbow Six represented a huge paradigm shift in video games. The ideas of stealth, tactics and realism were largely unexplored. The closest game in spirit to it was SWAT 2, which was released earlier the same year and wasn't nearly as pretty or detailed. Rainbow Six isn't about running and gunning like practically every other game in the action genre, or about sending wave after wave of cannon fodder into the fray like most strategy titles. Instead, it's almost like an action puzzle game in which players have to figure out the smartest, quickest and safest way to approach each mission.

The planning stages of each mission are as detailed as the missions themselves. Players have to choose the right equipment, plot out the paths of multiple teams complete with stopping points and procedure markers. It's a refreshingly intricate process that results in an incredible feeling of accomplishment when done right. Your teams move with precision, gun fights are quick and dangerous, and the hostages get rescued.

If it seems unlikely that such a complex game could come out in tandem with a book that was written in less than a year's time, that's because things went a little differently in the development of Rainbow Six. Red Storm Entertainment, the company that made the game, was one leg of Tom Clancy's multimedia brand. They started out in the mid-1990's making various stripes of strategy titles and were in the middle of designing a hostage rescue simulator when they caught wind of Clancy's upcoming novel about an international counter-terrorism unit. After some design changes and the writing of a rudimentary plot, Red Storm was on the fast track to what would eventually be one of the most beloved video games in history.

Since then, Ubisoft purchased Red Storm Entertainment and has put out a number of new Rainbow Six games that have seen as much success as the first. The most recent RS game is Rainbow Six: Vegas 2, a continuation of the streamlined console version of the franchise with some mild RPG elements. Tactics junkies still don't have many options in the industry that continues to prefer explosions and super heroes, but the games in the Rainbow Six series are difficult enough that they'll likely keep players occupied for a long time.