Follow the Rainbow

The Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six series has been around for a long time and has successfully invaded a lot of different systems. There have been more than a dozen games in the Rainbow Six family, including titles for the PC, the 32-bit consoles, wireless gadgets, and of course, Xbox®. With a Hollywood action film in the works and Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six® 3: Black Arrow™ now available for Microsoft’s gaming powerhouse (with new maps, missions, modes, and features), we’d thought we’d take a look at the history of this bestselling series.

Ding and “the boys.”

The series follows the adventures of top-flight anti-terrorist squad Rainbow Six, led by ace soldier Domingo “Ding” Chavez. Ding and his team were taken straight from the Tom Clancy books, which take place in an alternate future where the Soviet Union has fallen but international communism and lawlessness are still a major threat to American interests. When splinter groups from the former Soviet bloc start collaborating with organized criminals and terrorists, the Rainbow team is sent to stop them.

The first Rainbow Six game for the PC was released in 1998 to rave reviews that praised its intense action and high degree of realism. It allowed players to not only control their squadmates, but also to define the squad’s approach to each of the larger mission objectives. You could send your team in to clean out the enemy right off the bat, go straight to the bomb that needed to be defused, or scout out the locations of hostages before you started shooting. In what would become one of the franchise’s hallmarks, each mission began with a load-out screen that forced players to make strategic decisions about which weapons their squad would take into battle. Poor choices could result in mission failure, loss of squad mates, or both. Over the following years, expansion disks forRainbow Six followed with extra missions and weapons to keep PC gamers hooked.

Intense squad-based action.

In 2003, Ubi Soft entered the picture when its Montreal branch took over the franchise, adding the number “3” to the game’s title in Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six® 3: Raven Shield. The gameplay did not change dramatically, but there were lots of improvements to the graphics, A.I., and weapons selection. Sound became more important than ever, as enemy combatants would come to investigate any noises your team made, which could really throw a monkey wrench into your quiet infiltration of enemy headquarters. Raven Shield also introduced breach commands that could be issued to your squad, allowing you to peek into a room quietly before attacking or to just kick it down and go in with all guns blazing. These quiet leadership moments added quite a bit of tension to an already gripping game experience. A year later, the Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six® 3: Athena Sword expansion pack served as a sequel to Raven Shield, sending the Rainbow team to the Mediterranean to mop up the last of the terrorists that had survived the previous game.

Split-screen co-op.

In October 2003, Clancy’s elite team finally arrived on Xbox.Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six® 3 made a huge impression on Xbox gamers, virtually owning the “most popular” and “most played” game rankings on XboxLive™. The trip from PC to console controls was an easy one, as Ubi Soft Montreal once more rose to the challenge. The game’s detailed load-out screens, command trees, and combat controls were all seamlessly translated to the Xbox controller, even making use of the Xbox Live Communicator headset, so that you could issue orders verbally and have you’re A.I. squadmates respond quickly and efficiently.

Just as the PC series continued to evolve and improve with each new release, so it has been for the Xbox. Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six 3: Black Arrow adds new single-player missions, new multiplayer game modes, and—best of all—a new split-screen co-op mode, which allows two people to fight side-by-side on the same Xbox. The new title also makes full use of all the latest XboxLive upgrades, so that players can form their own teams (complete with mottos and logos) and organize their own tournaments.

If you thought the original was a great squad-based first-person shooter experience, wait until you see what Ding and the boys have in store for you in Black Arrow.

By J.N. Cobb