Make a splitscreen-only Splinter Cell, demands Hazelight boss, even as Ubisoft double-down on open worlds

Hazelight founder Josef Fares has called upon Ubisoft to make a splitscreen-only Splinter Cell game – a move that even I, with my absolute lack of business acumen, recognise as being comparable to demanding that Cadbury start making chocolate bars out of soot. He thinks it would be a “guaranteed success”.

I’m not saying I dislike the idea of splitscreen Splinter Cell. Ubisoft’s ancient military stealth series has decent form for co-op sneakery, with players of Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory teaming up to synchro-stab the soldiery. But come now, Master Fares. I know you’ve got to uphold your reputation for slashing up displays but please, have some dignity. Imagine the grim faces of the Splinter Cell faithful when Yves Guillemot rolls out footage of a splitscreen-only iteration, 12 years since the last one. Imagine the dozens of green laser dots slowly appearing on Guillemot’s face. Imagine the glisten of a thousand karambits being drawn from utility belts.

“Other publishers aren’t doing this, and it’s crazy to me,” Fares commented in a recent interview with GamesRadar. “So many people are playing these games, and people love them. I mean, I’m looking at Ubisoft, and they’re struggling now, and I hope someone [from there] listens to this interview, but why aren’t they taking Sam Fisher and doing a split-screen-only game?

“Don’t chicken out to do single-player; just say this is split-screen only,” he went on. “Boom, that’s it. You have success, and I can guarantee you that they will sell a huge amount of copies of that. Yeah, they don’t even have to do it the Hazelight way; why don’t they listen to this [interview] and be like, ‘Oh, he’s right.’ That’s a guaranteed success for them; it’s for you, Ubisoft. You can get it for free from me.”

It occurs to me that it’s been such an age between Cells that some of you probably don’t know or can’t recall the premise of Splinter Cell. Here is a quick recap: there is a grumpy man in black pyjamas called Sam Fisher, with three green torches stuck to his head. Sam’s job is to creep into places, stick knives and silenced bullets in terrorists, do the splits over hallways, and maybe hack a computer or deactivate a bomb. You’d think the terrorists would see Sam coming, given that he dresses like a broken traffic light, but somehow he always gets away with it, the scamp. Also he’s voiced by Michael Ironside, who sounds like a sexy chainsaw.

Ubisoft have been working on a Splinter Cell reboot since 2021 – “rewriting and updating” the story for new players, as a job posting put it in 2022. We’ve heard zilch of substance since, and Ubisoft’s recent mass layoffs suggest that they’re in no mood to release anything as specific in its appeal as a stealth game. Let alone a stealth game that can only be played by two people sitting on the same sofa – as if sofas even exist any longer, in these days of live servicing.

Indeed, Ubisoft have literally just told their investors that they’ll be doubling down on two “verticals” going forward: more of those online game-as-a-service things, and open-world action-adventures. Still, perhaps Yves Guillemot will find time amid efforts to sell the company to infiltrate Hazelight’s offices and empty a bin over Josef Fares’s head.