Red Storm Entertainment was founded in 1996. Originally part of Virtus, the company released its first game – Tom Clancy’s Politika, the first in the Power Plays series – in 1997. Based in the RTP area of North Carolina, Red Storm quickly gained a reputation for innovation with games like Dominant Species, one of the first 3D realtime strategy games.

However, it was with the genre-defining Rainbow Six (1998) that the company created the series that firmly established Red Storm on the map. A potent antidote to the run-and-gun first person shooters that had gone before, Rainbow Six was the first true tactical FPS, a game that rewarded patience and planning as well as good aim and a keen eye. Developed alongside the best-selling novel of the same name, Rainbow Six introduced terms like “one shot, one kill” and “tango down” into the gamer lexicon. Its ground-breaking multiplayer action, including a revolutionary form of cooperative gameplay, set the standard for tactical multiplayer.

Red Storm followed on the success of Rainbow Six with a mission pack, Eagle Watch, and then in 2000 with an award-winning sequel, Rainbow Six: Rogue Spear. Earning its reputation for hard-edged strategic gameplay and high-tech military accuracy, the company also expanded into turn-based strategy (ruthless.com and Shadow Watch) and military RTS (Force 21).

The success of Rogue Spear made Red Storm an attractive candidate for acquisition, and in 2000 the studio was purchased by UbiSoft. At the time of the sale, Red Storm was already hard at work on what would be the studio’s next genre-defining hit, a game that would take the tactical gameplay of Rainbow Six and turn it loose on the wide-open battlefields of the near future: Ghost Recon.