Tom Clancy's

• 1. A Name on 114 Million Games

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  Tom Clancy's is a label that, as of 2025, has been attached to more than 114 million video games sold. That is an unusual number for a name that began on the covers of novels. The games under it range from cramped submarine simulators on 1980s home computers to online-only shooters played in a modern city. Few of them share a story, a setting, or even a genre with one another. So how did a single author's name become one of the most recognizable brands in military gaming? Who actually built these games, and how much did the man himself have to do with them? And what holds the label together when the games rarely cross paths?

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• 2. Submarines and Source Novels

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  In 1987, a company called Grandslam Entertainment released a submarine simulation loosely based on The Hunt for Red October. It ran on the IBM PC, the Commodore 64 and the Amiga. A year later, MicroProse followed with Red Storm Rising, another submarine sim only loosely tied to the novel that shared its name, and it appeared on the same three machines. The film version of The Hunt for Red October arrived in 1990 and produced two separate game tie-ins. One came from Grandslam again, spread across the Amiga, Amstrad CPC, Atari ST, Commodore 64, DOS and ZX Spectrum. The other was built for the NES, the Game Boy and the SNES. Not every early adaptation went underwater. In 1991, Capstone Software published The Cardinal of the Kremlin as a management simulation for the Amiga and DOS. Then in 1996, Simon & Schuster Interactive released Tom Clancy's SSN, another submarine sim, for the IBM PC. That same year, Clancy himself stepped into the business of making games.

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• 3. The Red Storm Years

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  In 1996, Clancy co-founded a developer named Red Storm Entertainment. His name ended up on several of its most successful games. Red Storm's first releases leaned on his Power Plays material. Tom Clancy's Politika came in 1997 as a game in the style of Risk. Tom Clancy's ruthless.com followed in 1998 as a strategy game. Shadow Watch arrived in 2000 as a turn-based strategy game. Then came a sharp change of format. The Sum of All Fears, released in 2002, was a tactical first-person shooter with a style similar to Rainbow Six. Under the hood, it ran on the engine from Ghost Recon, and its plot followed the film of the same name. By then Ubisoft was the publisher behind it, producing the game for Microsoft Windows, the PlayStation 2 and the GameCube. Ubisoft eventually bought Red Storm and kept using the Clancy name. Just how much Clancy shaped the games or the properties built around them, if at all, was never made clear.

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• 4. Perpetual Rights

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  In 2008, Ubisoft acquired perpetual rights to Clancy's name and works. The deal covered video games and related media, including books and film. That ownership explains the branding seen today. Ubisoft uses Tom Clancy's as a banner over a series of games, most of them shooters set in modern or near-future military worlds, with tactics at the center of play. The early entries stayed close to Clancy's own writing. More recent ones are inspired by it only loosely. The shared banner also promises less than it might seem to. Crossovers between the sub-franchises are rare, so a player moving from one series to another meets a new cast and a new world.

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• 5. Squads and Battlefields

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  Rainbow Six began in 1998 and is still running. It is a series of squad-based first-person tactical shooters drawn from the novel of the same name, and its action usually unfolds in closed urban spaces. Fifteen Rainbow Six games have been produced so far. Ghost Recon started in 2001 and also continues. It hands players a squad too, but it mixes first-person and third-person play. It usually sets its missions across larger outdoor areas, where Rainbow Six stays indoors. Ghost Recon has produced fifteen games of its own. The contrast is deliberate: one series trades in tight rooms and the other in open ground. A third series, begun a year after Ghost Recon, left the squad behind for something much quieter.

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• 6. Stealth, War and the Sky

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  Splinter Cell debuted in 2002 and is still active. It is an action-adventure series of third-person covert-ops stealth games. In recent years it has spread into print, with a line of books written by a rotating group of authors who all publish under the pseudonym David Michaels. EndWar ran from 2008 to 2014 and swapped stealth for real-time tactics. It imagined a speculative World War III set in 2020. H.A.W.X was short-lived, running from 2009 to 2010, and offered arcade-style combat flying. The most recent addition is The Division, which began in 2016 and continues today. It is an online-only action role-playing third-person shooter, and it is the clearest sign of how far the label has traveled from the submarine sims of 1987.

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