Splinter Cell was the first game I worked on that was actually released. In the Winter of 1998 I interviewed with the newly-formed UbiSoft New York City studio and joined in early 1999. Initially I was working in a game called The Drift, which had a lot of art but not much else. After some tumultuous years trying to find what the game wanted to be, and moving the team to Montreal, Quebec, we ended up creating a from-scratch IP under the “Tom Clancy” label, though he had almost nothing to with the IP's creation.
At first the team was just a handful (four, to be exact) of us from the NYC office along with a few of the Montreal studio team. However as the game gained momentum the team grew and the game… well the game did pretty well for UbiSoft, allowing it to change from a studio mostly working on kids’ licensed properties to one able to create mature, narrative-based games like Splinter Cell, then Prince of Persia, Assassin’s Creed, Watchdogs and more.
My role on Splinter Cell was one of the original creative team of four (you can see the earliest concept for Sam fisher below), that generated the basic premise, design, story and level breakdown. Later I would serve as the level design lead and level designer on the Training and CIA levels - I also created the initial prototype levels when we were still pitching and concepting the game internally at Ubi.