Rainbow Six wasn't the first PC simulation to give gamers the opportunity to perform daring hostage rescues or eliminate terrorist threats, but its phenomenal success has overshadowed all of its competitors. With over 500,000 copies sold worldwide, Rainbow Six has been a mainstay in PC Data's Top 20 since its August 1998 release, and the Rainbow Six Gold Pack (Rainbow Six plus the Eagle Watch add-on disc) debuted in PC Data's Top 10 list. It's also become one of the hottest retail games on the Microsoft Gaming Zone, surpassing even Microsoft's own Age of Empires to become the most-played retail game on one of the world's largest multiplayer gaming networks. And Rainbow Six isn't just a fan fave - it's won numerous awards and received high praises from nearly every critic who delved into its unique mix of action, strategy, and spellbinding realism.

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Numbers like that would make any software publisher happy, especially a relative newcomer like Red Storm Entertainment, but they also mean there are legions of fans expecting quite a lot from the next entry in the Rainbow Six series. Carl Schnurr, producer for Rainbow Six and its sequel, Rogue Spear, is well aware of this and says that "with Rogue Spear, our overarching goal has been 'leave no stone unturned.' We've tried to change or enhance virtually everything about the game."

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And much of the impetus for the changes came from the very same fans who made Rainbow Six such a huge success. "The changes in Rogue Spear really came from a combination of user input, press input, and the changes that we as a team wanted to see," says Schnurr. Of course, you're going to get some strange requests any time you're dealing with die-hard gamers always ready to push their action to the extreme, and some of the ideas users submitted just didn't fit into Red Storm's idea of what Rogue Spear is all about. Schnurr says, "We had a lot of bizarre suggestions - rocket launchers, bodies blown apart by grenades, entrance and exit wounds, respawning, and nuclear grenades. Most of these we didn't implement either because they weren't realistic and didn't fit in with the spirit of the game or were just not things we could do within the constraints of time and technology." But Schnurr also says that some user requests - such as the ability for team members to lie prone or wield a grenade launcher - were left out not because they weren't good ideas, but because they simply couldn't be incorporated in time for this release. "Maybe next time," he says.

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