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Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six

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For the novel, see Rainbow Six (novel). For the first computer game, see Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six.

Rainbow Six is fictional character John Clark's position as director of the counter-terrorist unit Rainbow that debuted in the 1998 novel Rainbow Six by Tom Clancy. The book was adapted into a successful series of tactical first-person shooter computer and video games, and is a planned future film tentatively set for release in 2010.

Tom Clancy also features Rainbow in his 2000 novel The Bear and the Dragon.

Team Rainbow

The novel Rainbow Six describes Rainbow as an international counter-terrorism operation hosted by NATO.

The base of operations for Rainbow is located in Hereford (home to SAS), due to the United Kingdom being one of the most accessible countries in the world and also due to the press constraints that would not be possible to impose in the United States. Most of the characters in Rainbow are American or British, however, the NATO countries of France, Germany, Canada and Italy, plus Israel have one representative each.

Clancy describes the structure of Rainbow as having one Director(rainbow 6), who oversees the entire operation, and one Deputy Director(rainbow 5), who is second in command. Rainbow is portrayed as the "blackest of black" operations, and it works off of its very own intelligence service which has intelligence contacts all over the world. In the book, when Rainbow is called upon for help from another country's government to deal with a terrorist situation, usually only one of the two teams will be sent, but in some situations both will be sent. Both teams have an officer as team leader and a senior NCO that is second in command. Not including the team leader, each team is made up of eleven men.

The novel

Main article: Rainbow Six (novel)

The novel, Rainbow Six, was written by Tom Clancy and published in 1998. It is part of the Jack Ryan series; however, the novel actually focuses on John Clark, Ding Chavez, and a fictional multinational counter-terrorist organization named Rainbow.

Computer and video games

File:RainbowSixbox.jpg
The first game in the series defined the tactical shooter genre.

The first game was developed by Red Storm Entertainment, while the novel was being written. The game later spawned a number of sequels and expansion packs. Red Storm was later acquired by Ubisoft, who currently develops and publishes the games.

Rainbow Six and its sequels defined the tactical shooter genre, forcing players to focus more time and effort on stealth, teamwork, and tactics rather than on sheer firepower. With some of the more recent releases, however, the game has taken on more of a "mainstream" first-person shooter approach in an attempt to appeal to a wider audience by moving away from the tactical planning aspect that made the game popular in the first place, partly due to rising game development costs.

PC games

A Korean-only game called Rainbow Six: Take-Down - Missions in Korea was created for the South Korean market by KAMA Digital Entertainment. The game boasted South Korean RAINBOW operatives and weapons with a different story and interface. Currently, it's not available for purchase outside South Korea.

Console games

Handheld

The film

Template:Future film A film adaptation of the novel and video game has been in the works for quite some time. The movie has been scheduled to be release in 2010.

Connections to other games

Though the Splinter Cell and the Ghost Recon are known to take place in the same universe (Chaos Theory and Ghost Recon 2 take place during the same events, and Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2 specifically mentions 'Third Echelon', an organization from the Splinter Cell game series). Rainbow Six takes place in the same universe as all the Jack Ryan novels.

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