Guillaume Dousse, the director of Netflix’s animated series Splinter Cell: Deathwatch, can’t tell me anything about Ubisoft’s Splinter Cell remake.
Sorry, guys. I asked.
“I wish I had something to say, and the security clearance to get this kind of information,” Dousse said, laughing a little, when we talked last week about Splinter Cell: Deathwatch—and I tried to wheedle out a little information about the upcoming remake.
“There was definitely a connection with the team working, or who have worked on Splinter Cell, and I know that there have been, definitely, discussions about this,” he said. “But in terms of the details, I can’t really say much, unfortunately.”
That leaves fans who have been waiting for over a decade for a new Splinter Cell game with nothing to go on beyond what we’ve already known since 2021: there’s a Splinter Cell remake in the works, and has been for a while, and it’ll be out, well, who the heck knows when?
Before directing Splinter Cell: Deathwatch for Netflix, which features an older Sam Fisher coming out of retirement to help a younger agent complete her mission, Dousse was already a longtime Splinter Cell fan. “I played the games when I was younger, essentially the first trilogy, when I was somewhere around 11 to 13 years old,” he said.
“The stealth action games were very much my jam back then,” Dousse said. “Splinter Cell, Hitman, Metal Gear, all that. I always thought it was just a great, very cinematic kind of style of game as well, because you had so much time to move forward [at] your pace and really take the time to establish your own strategy.”
And just like the rest of us, Dousse is keen to play a new Splinter Cell game.
“It is definitely a franchise that I wish would come back as a game format,” he said. “In my seat, I just felt very fortunate to be able to bring back Sam, and I really hope that this series will help as well, you know, give more reasons to revive the games.”
I asked Dousse if he’d prefer the remake of the first Splinter Cell game, or would be more interested in something entirely new, such as a game featuring an older version of Sam Fisher, like we see in Splinter Cell: Deathwatch.
“As a gamer, I think just rediscovering the first game as a pure remake, and not just—how do you call that? Just an upscale of resolution?—feels interesting, because I think the first game was so memorable to me,” he said.
“I hope that the [Netflix] series will inspire Ubisoft, if they feel that there’s something to take from it and build from it… that will be really exciting. I think that’s really for the fans, as well, to decide, if this is a version they enjoy. But yeah, I don’t know how this series would translate as a game. I would be very curious.”
Splinter Cell: Deathwatch is available now to stream on Netflix.
