Think about stealth for a moment. In real life, it means turning on voicemail and leaving via the side door at 4:30 on a Friday.
In video games, it means creeping around enemies with inhumanly sharp computer intution so that you can either avoid or dispatch them with ultimate discretion.
Metal Gear Solid is the stealth genre pioneer, but it was Ubisoft’s Splinter Cell that elevated the tension of sneaking-around video games. The more realistic the stealth metrics of Splinter Cell got, the more unreal the experience became.
You never walk around your cubicle thinking about how much light’s falling on your body, monitoring the noise of your footfalls or measuring just how long your boss’s cigarette breaks take. Real life doesn’t call for that kind of focus. But Splinter Cell does, and that rigor made every snapped neck and silenced gunshot from secret agent Sam Fisher harmonize into its own sweet symphony.