2015.12.04 - Eurogamer - The agony and ecstasy behind the first Rainbow Six
- There's a lot of very interesting info here.
- "I don't have any design documents relating to the original Rainbow Six," says Upton. "That's because there weren't any. There was a list of missions and a plot outline, but mostly we figured things out as we went along with the only 'documentation' being the code and the art files themselves. It was a stupid way to make a game, and a mistake we never repeated."
  Upton himself was lead designer, though he admits the title meant little. "There were no designers on Rainbow Six - design was something that happened around the margins as people were programming or making art.
  "Don't do that," Upton warns. "It's a bad way to make a game."
  (...)
  The developer's origins come from Virtus, a company kickstarted from the proceeds made by adventure game The Colony, designed by David Smith, and which made 3D modelling tools. Clancy himself was a fan of The Colony, and was an early investor in Virtus, and the author and Smith soon become friends looking for ways to collaborate together.
  Virtus and Clancy had some success in 1996 with submarine simulator SSN, but both were looking for more. And so Red Storm was founded, a partnership between Tom Clancy, former submarine commander Doug Littlejohns and 15 employees from Virtus.
  (...)
  The first step of the game was to prototype the one shot/one kill mechanic, achieved by way of a Quake mod. Even in the game's infancy, the team knew they were on to something special.
  [NW: This is how you get started!]
  (...)
  Littlejohns is keen to point out that he's not a gamer, and as a businessman he wanted to make a name for Red Storm with a quick and solid game. "We kicked around a different set of action games, strategy games, whatever. There was a game called Doom, which was just mindless roaring around in an environment with a machine gun in front of you shooting everything that appeared, and that was hugely successful but to my mind it was mindless, and so I quite liked the idea of a strategy but on the other hand I'd looked at some strategy games and I thought they're boring as well because they're so slow. So, we thought about mixing action and strategy." [NW: It really can be that straightforward!]
  (...)
  The below map, sketched out on graph paper, is of the game's 9th mission: Red Wolf. This documentation shows every bit of guidance the team had for the mission.
  [NW: Very interesting to see real design docs!]

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