Jade Raymond's Splinter Sell

March 28th, 2013, 23:57 Posted By: wraggster

It may have sold 22m units across the world, but Ubisoft feels Splinter Cell should be doing even better.
And so it’s tasked one of the masterminds behind Assassin’s Creed to lead a revolution for the spy franchise. MCV speaks to Jade Raymond...
One of my first jobs in the games industry was on Splinter Cell.
I was part of the localisation team that worked on Splinter Cell: Double Agent (2006), and it was here that I fell in love with the series. Never before had a game so successfully made me feel like an actual spy.
And I’m clearly not alone, the Splinter Cell series has sold over 22m units worldwide. It has made $500m in revenue and the five main games in the franchise have never scored lower than 85 on Metacritic.
But Splinter Cell should be doing so much better.
After Double Agent in 2006, Ubisoft set out to make a more accessible Splinter Cell game called Conviction. The game placed a heavier focus on action over stealth and when it launched it did rather well. Critics liked it and it shifted 2m units in a short space of time.
But, due to a difficult and protracted development, Conviction took over four years to build. And by the time game launched in 2010, Ubisoft had released two Assassin’s Creed games, and the publisher’s definition of a successful franchise had changed.
Splinter Cell had been usurped by Assassin’s Creed as Ubisoft’s top core games franchise. And one of the brains behind its success was producer Jade Raymond.
Raymond worked on the first two Assassin’s Creed games, but she’s since departed the franchise to lead a new development outfit in Toronto, Canada. A studio that’s hard at work on the next Splinter Cell title: Blacklist.

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