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It had been a tough few months. Development of the very first Rainbow Six had left the team exhausted and panicky, and the party held at developer Red Storm Entertainment's studio in North Carolina after the game shipped promised some sort of relief. It promised to be special, too - the studio's founder and world famous novelist Tom Clancy was going to be making an appearance. "As a way to say 'thank you' he offered to autograph a copy of the game for each of us," lead designer Brian Upton says. "Everyone in that room had been working crunch hours for over a year. People had practically killed themselves to get that game out the door. Even though it had his name on the box, it wasn't his game. It was our game. He should have been asking us to sign a copy for him! I was so pissed I went off to be alone in my office so I wouldn't say anything to get myself fired."
Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six had a troubled development, but it can lay claim to being the father of the military shooter genre, introducing the world of video games to Rainbow, a multinational unit of black ops badasses taking on the jobs that no other government will touch. Perhaps the team at Red Storm could see some parallels between themselves and those operatives. With Rainbow Six, a team of committed but inexperienced professionals managed to pull a world-class game together, completely against the odds.
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