Splinter Cell (or Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell) is a Stealth-Based Game and the first entry in the eponymous series, released on Sixth Generation consoles and PC in 2002.
Sam Fisher, a former Navy SEAL and CIA operative, is brought out of retirement by his old commander, Irving Lambert, to take part in a new NSA initiative called Third Echelon, a black-ops program involving the insertion of a single operative into sensitive, high-security situations to gather intel and, where necessary, neutralize targets, all without being seen or heard. For his first mission as part of Third Echelon, Sam is sent in Georgia to investigate the activities of the country's shady president, Kombayn Nikoladze. In doing so, he uncovers (and must thwart) a large terrorist conspiracy that reaches as far as East Asia and poses a major threat to U.S. security and world peace.
As the first in its series, the game was stealth in its purest form; Sam was almost completely balanced with his enemies in terms of killing power, and a number of missions forbade him from killing any enemies or even triggering an alarm, so a very heavy emphasis was placed on avoiding confrontation altogether.
Followed by Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow.
A remake of the game has been announced by Ubisoft in December 2021, using the Snowdrop engine.
The game provides examples of the following tropes:
- Action-Based Mission: The Kalinatek mission more or less forces the player to kill quite a number of enemies, and there are few opportunities to sneak past them. The ending of the Abattoir mission as well as the library in the last mission are also examples.
- Alternate History: Qualifies as this, as there have been no similar events involving a Georgian president so far. The area hasn't been safe from troubles
in the 2000s, however. - Artistic License – Geography: The actual presidential palace in Tbilisi (Georgia) looks nothing like the one featured in the last mission, which is situated atop a cliff to add platforms for Fisher to climb.
- Artistic License – Nuclear Physics: One of the plot points is a large stash of Americium-239, which is ostensibly going to be used for an atomic weapon. Not only is Americium-239 not a fissile isotope, but it also has a half-life of less than 12 hours, meaning that is there a very short window of opportunity to use it. Even using this isotope in a dirty bomb is impractical because its primary mode of decay is electron-capture which doesn't produce any radiation beside a harmless electron neutrino. On the other hand, when it does decay, it decays into Plutonium-239 (well, 99.99% of it does, the remaining 0.01% of it undergoes alpha decay into Neptunium-235, which can further decay into Uranium-235), which is much better for making a nuclear weapon. So, while they wouldn't have been able to make it with what they started with, all they had to do was wait for about twelve hours for it to turn into something they could really use, and in great quantities without having to refine it too much further; since this point isn't brought up in-game, it's hard to say whether the developers knew that and were averting As You Know (at the expense of those who didn't) or just picked americium at random simply to avoid the more standard plutonium or uranium and got lucky.
- Anachronism Stew: The American soldiers seen in the news cutscenes look more at home in the early 1980s than the early 2000s. Although the US Army at both times wore Woodland pattern Battle Dress Uniforms, the soldiers in the game wear helmets resembling M1 steel pot helmets and Vietnam War style flak jackets as opposed to the PASGT helmet and vest that was actually worn around the time of the game's release and setting.
- Bag of Holding: About all Sam can carry around that is physically present on him are his weapons, his pistol in a thigh holster and his rifle slung over his back, and his OPSAT under his left forearm. Everything else, from his lockpicks to hand grenades, is never shown unless he's actively using it.
- Big Bad Duumvirate: Georgian president Kombayn Nikoladze and Chinese PLA renegade general Kong Feirong ally themselves to commit acts of terror against the U.S.
- Blatant Lies: When you grab Nikoladze and interrogate him, he acts like he has no idea what the Ark is. He keeps the act going even when Cristavi's elite guard rush in and hold both him and Sam at gunpoint. He finally drops the act when one of the guards outright spells out for him they know what the Ark is (a nuclear suitcase bomb) and even continues lying to save himself by claiming Sam has the activation key for it.
- Boom, Headshot!: How Nikoladze bites it at the end, courtesy of Sam on Lambert's orders.
- Cliffhanger Copout: The final mission in the Mission Pack DLC, Vselka Submarine. Sam finds a video file in the Vselka's central server, hid in a torpedo tube to await launch... and the afterword, like its preceding missions, is nothing but a Russian map. No word on Alekseevich, no word on the warheads - the only loose end tied up is the death of Masse.
- Concealing Canvas: During the first mission in Georgia, Sam has to retrieve information from the PC of a CIA agent who got caught and killed by Nikoladze's goons. Said PC is hidden in the agent's apartment behind a painting.
- Decapitated Army: The support team outright tells Sam that when he takes out Grinko, his mercenaries will give up and go home now that there's nobody to pay them. Sure enough, the Abattoir mission immediately ends once you've hollowed out his skull, although you've already incapacitated or killed pretty much all of his mercenaries by this point.
- Dirty Cop: The Georgian police in Tbilisi. A few seconds past Mission Control describing the cops "as crooked as a Virginia fence", Sam overhears two crooked cops Kick the Dog by harassing and threatening a drunkard. You can also find an email in the level noting a corpse with a skull caved in by what appears to be the same sorts of batons those police carry.
- Early-Installment Weirdness: Super-hearing guards that instantly know where Sam is if they sense anything amiss, bodies that are automatically found when you pass checkpoints if they're not hidden in darkness even if they're otherwise inaccessible, no sound meter yet so you have a tough time trying to figure how to move, an alarm system that can only go off a maximum of three times before it's a game over, no ability to put in keypad codes with your keyboard's numpad on PC, and an overall game design that is extensively trial-and-error. Notably, it takes two games to get to Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory to iron most of this out, partly the result of Pandora Tomorrow being an Expansion Pack hastily turned into a full sequel.
- Elite Mooks:: The Georgian Special Forces in the final mission are... disappointing. They wear night-vision goggles, but that just means that it's a little easier for them to spot you if you move rapidly near them. They still can't see you in normal darkness even if they have a perfect line-of-sight, as long as you move slowly and/or are more than a dozen or so feet away from them.
- Establishing Character Moment: The game opens with Lambert entering a secure interview room, only to find Fisher has broken into the place ahead of time and is waiting for him.
- Even Evil Has Standards: In the Abattoir level, one of the enemy soldiers voices his displeasure over his boss deciding to murder captive U.S. soldiers and webcast their killings over the Internet, calling it "barbaric". Some of the mercs in the Kalinatek level also express seeming displeasure with the night's grisly work.
- Expansion Pack: The Rainbow Six 3 companion disc for the Xbox features three downloadable missions for the game. Most versions of Chaos Theory included a disc with them for that respective version of the original game. These discs are now the only way to legitimately download these extra missions, ever since Microsoft discontinued online support for the Xbox.
- Gas Leak Cover-Up: At the end, the National Guard evacuates an apartment building in Maryland to defuse and remove a nuclear bomb planted there by terrorists. The government tells the public that the building was evacuated due to a gas leak.
- Lampshade Hanging: Late in the game, Grinko sends out an email telling his men to stop sending door codes to sensitive areas through email, due to a "security catastrophe" caused by this.
- Lockpicking Minigame: You are shown the innards of the lock you're picking, with a varying number of pins, which you have to set one by one by figuring out which direction triggers each one and pressing it repeatedly until it sets.
- Musical Spoiler: Whenever an enemy feels something's not right, there's a "DONG" sound, followed by the level's own "Stress" soundtrack.
- No Celebrities Were Harmed: Nikoladze and Georgia appear to be an expy of Slobodan Milošević and his rump Yugoslavia respectively, albeit taken to eleven. Azerbaijan fills in the role of Kosovo (a mostly Islamic nation being persecuted by a primarily Eastern Orthodox one), being brutalized by Nikoladze and his army, prompting international intervention as happened in reality. Given that the Kosovar War happened a few years before the game's release, it's not that surprising.
- No-Gear Level: In the first few levels, you only have a pistol and don't get your fancy rifle until the CIA level near the middle of the campaign. You don't have any weapon whatsoever when starting the CIA level, besides.
- Oh, Crap!: When inside the palace, the NSA decrypts the intel Fisher gathered and discovers that the Ark is a nuclear bomb.
- President Evil: Kombayn Nikoladze, the president of Georgia, is quite a nasty piece of work, what with invading Azerbaijan, launching cyber-attacks on the U.S. and planning to detonate a dirty bomb there.
- Renegade Russian: The rogue General Kong Feirong is a communist China version.
- What Measure Is a Mook?: In the Abattoir level, one of the satchels dropped by a Georgian soldier when he is killed contains a heartfelt letter from a female significant other back home.
- With This Herring: Sam's earlier missions have his only firearm being his pistol. Him having to retrieve his rifle from a certain location was probably intended to justify this, but it doesn't explain why the NSA or Third Echelon couldn't have issued him an interim rifle before he retrieves the SC-20K.
