Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell
During the Steam Summer Sale of 2022 I purchased Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Blacklist, a 2013 game I had largely ignored, despite my being a fan of the franchise. That Summer day, however, I found myself with a hankering for some fanfiction of Tom Clancy’s fanfiction of the USA Imperialism Expanded Universe. Upon playing the opening hour, however, I was disappointed to find that the game’s tone was less ‘Tom Clancy’ and more ‘Marvel’, what with the flying plane-base equipped with floor-to-ceiling hologram screens and the spectacular explosions and the ominous villain out to defeat all of America. It was just like the fourth Die Hard, Live Free or Die Hard, in which Bruce Willis teams up with the ‘I’m a Mac’ guy from the Apple commercials to defeat terrorists who have hacked all of America. In the first film Bruce having to walk over broken glass barefoot was a big deal - in the fourth one he ramps a car off a median to take out a helicopter. I yearned for the subtler, more realism-focused games of the 00s that I remembered.
As such, I booted up Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell to satisfy my hankering. The opening cutscene, with its serious sounding monologue, V-22 Osprey, and military drumline oozed the desired Tom Clancy vibe. Then, however, a guitar riff - long-unremembered to my ears, bubbled up from under that drumline. It built until a record needle scratched, and my jaw dropped as the new track screamed “LISTEN ALL YOU MOTHER-”.
I had forgotten that the bulk of Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell’s opening cutscene is set to The Crystal Method’s 2001 megahit “Name of the Game’.
The fifth track on the album Tweekend, Name of the Game samples extensively from Tina Dixon’s 1974 pornographic novelty disco track Calling All Freaks, synthesizing Dixon’s sex-lyrics with the big-beat and post-grunge sounds of the new millennium to create a track that reverberates with the energy of the self-imagined badass.
It’s this energy that propelled ‘The Name of the Game’ to appear in 2002’s Resident Evil film, as well as 2002’s Blade II, as well as 2002’s Half Past Dead starring Steven Segal, as well as 2002’s Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever - a film notable for being one of the few on Rotten Tomatoes with a 0% Tomatometer rating, an honor shared with 2004’s Superbabies: Baby Geniuses 2.
Bear with me, this is important, but the only reason I know of the existence of 2004’s Superbabies: Baby Geniuses 2 was that I, age 11, saw commercials for it on Disney Channel at my friend’s house (my family did not have cable, ergo, no Disney Channel). The film’s depiction of a toddler, cocooned inside a large bouncy ball, saying ‘I’ll always bounce back’ before bouncing all over a group of goons is a sequence that will be inside my brain forever always. Also unlike my friend’s parents, my parents did not get me issues of Electronic Gaming Monthly. During sleepovers, it was on those pages that I saw a name I only ever saw on my father’s bookshelf: Tom Clancy, a writer of books for adults, and who apparently also wrote games.
From my friend’s magazines, I learned of Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow and its protagonist, the 4th-grader’s vision of the pinnacle of American masculinity: Sam Fisher. Neither of us were old enough to be allowed to play as Sam, but that didn’t stop us from pretending - sneaking about our houses and neighborhoods, doubtlessly raising a few eyebrows at the sight of a couple of kids trying to stay out of sight. A year later, when the multiplayer for Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory was being teased, we risked minor injury by mimicking the new two-man wall climbing moves and the like. The takeaway is that I did not, actually, get to experience playing Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell in its cultural moment - it only existed in my imagination and what I could glean from magazine promotional materials.
Moving back up one level, Name of the Game also appears in the trailer for the fourth Die Hard film, Live Free or Die Hard from 2007, a film I watched with my father, who rented it during a night when my mother was out. By 2008 the song had largely become a joke, with it being featured in Owen Wilson’s 2008 comedy film Drillbit Taylor, as well as The Crystal Method themselves creating a parody remix entitled ‘Name of the Game (The Crystal Method's Big Ass T.T. Mix)’ for the 2008 comedy film ‘Tropic Thunder’. In 2009, my father rented Tropic Thunder during a night when my mother was out. As the credits rolled, I looked up from my geometry homework as Name of the Game (The Crystal Method's Big Ass T.T. Mix) reverberated through the family living room. The synthesis of brash, obscene vocals with an aggressive baseline and driving beat - It was a 9th-grader’s vision of the pinnacle of American music. The takeaway is that I did not experience Name of the Game in its cultural moment - I was born too late to live the life of a leathergoth in a society when the Patriot Act was still fresh, but the song did electrify my teenage brain nonetheless.
In 2010 I got a Steam account, and the second game I bought was Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell. I opened it up, and was thrilled to discover the opening cutscene was set to a song I knew and loved: The Crystal Method’s 2001 megahit, Name of the Game. I always knew Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell was cool because it had Tom Clancy’s name on the box and Sam Fisher in the gameplay, but now it was even cooler.
I did not actually finish Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell in 2010 because the PC port has a bug that causes spotlights and flashlight beams not to render - a real liability for anyone trying to sneak around. I managed to muddle through without actually being able to see any of these phantom light sources, but was eventually broken upon the rocks of the final level’s initial spotlight-laden courtyard.
On Sunday, September 4th, 2022, one month shy of the game’s 20th anniversary, I finished Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell. I was able to fix the spotlight bug with help from a Steam guide that gave the following instructions:
1. right click on splinter cell
2. click properties
3. click "set launch options..."
4. enter "-shadowmode=projector"
Which worked perfectly.
Anyways, the game itself.
Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell is a third-person, stealth action game released in late 2002. The game pulls heavily from the Metal Gear and Thief games, taking the former’s military stealth and the latter’s shadow-based hiding mechanics and eschewing each of their cameras for an over-the-shoulder perspective. This proved to be wildly influential - Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, initially featuring a top-down camera, re-released itself as Metal Gear Solid 3: Subsistence with a Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell-style camera a year later, and maintained that perspective for all future installments.
The game opens with a training obstacle course, which is appropriate, because the entire game is essentially one long stealthy obstacle course with a wallpapering of a Tom Clancy-esque plot to string the levels together. While there are technically characters and events that lead into each other, I’m almost tempted to say that the story, which involves the President of Georgia hacking all of America, exists less as a narrative construct and more of a tone piece to contextualize the levels. It really does feel like they came up with the levels first and then spitballed justifications for why you were sneaking through them later. Granted, one could spend some serious time analyzing the underlying themes of this threadbare plot, like how ‘The Fifth Freedom’ is used to ignore the sovereignty of all countries wherever and whenever, or how it deals with ethnic cleansing in the Caucasus, or how writers envisioned “Information Warfare” in the age before The Facebook, but I’m not going to, because this is already on the long side and I’m not cutting the Superbabies: Baby Geniuses 2 bit.
I hate to say it, but while I enjoy Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell’s deliberate, slow pace (yes, I even like how your walking speed is bound to the scroll wheel when not using a pad. It gives such a granularity of control), the level design in this game is a real drag. This isn’t strictly the level designers fault - all these polygons and lights on Xbox and PS2 hardware were expensive to render, but it means levels tend to be cramped. To advance through any given area you’ll have to intuit the specific set of steps that the designers envisioned, which means frequent quicksaves, deaths, quickloads. Even ‘traditional’ stealth sections where you memorize guard patterns and artfully slip by are uncommon - frequently it’s you, a guard, a tight hallway, and your silenced pistol. That, or a game of “guess what the devs were thinking for this part.” Modern stealth games, and even older ones like Deus Ex, Thief, and Metal Gear Solid, lean into a mode of ‘Improv Stealth Playground’ which just isn’t present here.
There’s also a lack of consistency with regards to level ethos. Some levels are stealthy (like the one where you sneak through the CIA headquarters) and others are near-shooter in gameplay (like the tech-company-overrun by Russian mercs that follows immediately after the CIA level). It’s frequently unclear if Sam is supposed to be a ghost or a commando, and blending the two playstyles is inelegant and frequently impossible.
Some assorted thoughts:
The dynamic lights are impressive for 2002 - dudes carry flashlights, spotlights filter through fences, and this was three years before F.E.A.R.!
The oil rig level is hot garbage. Even if the physics on PC didn’t make the opening section near-unplayable, it still wouldn’t be good. At least it’s the shortest level.
The actor who played Mr. Ratburn on the PBS Kids show Arthur voices a Chinese soldier at one point. It is… something.
The Bottom Line
While graphically robust and innovative control-wise for 2003, neither the gameplay nor story make Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell worth returning to over other stealth contemporaries of the era.