Red Storm Entertainment was founded in 1996. Originally part of Virtus, the company released its first game – Tom Clancy’s Politika, the first in the

Power Plays series – in 1997. Based in the RTP area of North Carolina, Red Storm quickly gained a reputation for innovation with games like Dominant Species, one of the first 3D realtime strategy games.

    However, it was with the genre-defining Rainbow Six (1998) that the company created the series that firmly established Red Storm on the map. A potent antidote to the run-and-gun first person shooters that had gone before, Rainbow Six was the first true tactical FPS, a game that rewarded patience and planning as well as well as good aim and a keen eye. Developed alongside the best-selling novel of the same name, Rainbow Six introduced terms like “one shot, one kill” and “tango down” into the gamer lexicon. Its ground-breaking multiplayer action, including a revolutionary form of cooperative gameplay, set the standard for tactical multiplayer.

    Red Storm followed on the success of Rainbow Six with a mission pack, Eagle Watch, and then in 2000 with an award-winning sequel, Rainbow Six: Rogue Spear. Earning its reputation for hard-edged strategic gameplay and high-tech military accuracy, the company also expanded into turn-based strategy (ruthless.com and Shadow Watch) and military RTS (Force 21).

    The success of Rogue Spear made Red Storm an attractive candidate for acquisition, and in 2000 the studio was purchased by UbiSoft. At the time of the sale, Red Storm was already hard at work on what would be the studio’s next genre-defining hit, a game that would take the tactical gameplay of Rainbow Six and turn it loose on the wide-open battlefields of the near future: Ghost Recon.

    Released in 2000, Ghost Recon won multiple Game of the Year awards and kicked off another best-selling series of games for Red Storm. The Xbox version also marked the first time RSE ventured into in-house console development, and was the first Xbox Live! title to truly take advantage of the possibilities of console multiplayer. Followup add-ons like Island Thunder continued to expand the world of the Ghosts, while Red Storm itself grew and moved offices to a new location in Morrisville, NC.

     By 2003, Ubisoft was ready to consolidate its North Carolina operations. Ubi’s other area studio, Sinister Games in downtown Raleigh, was integrated into Red Storm, with the central base of operations remaining at the Morrisville location.

    In 2004, Red Storm released Ghost Recon 2, the successful followup to the original game. Delivered on Xbox, it signaled the company’s transition to primarily console development. It produced an add-on, Summit Strike, in 2005, which moved the action to Kazakhstan, as well as extensive and highly-regarded downloadable content, something which would become a hallmark of the franchise.

    More recently, Red Storm has developed the multiplayer aspects of both iterations of the Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter series. With innovative cooperative campaign gameplay and incredibly customizable multiplayer, GRAW multiplayer continued the Red Storm tradition of setting the standard for tactical multiplayer. The level of the team’s achievement was recognized by the prestigious BAFTAs, which bestowed the Game of the Year and Best Technical Achievement awards on it in 2006.

    Now in its second decade, Red Storm continues to work on a wide range of projects, both collaboratively with other studios and in its own right. A pillar of the vibrant and growing game development in the Research Triangle area, Red Storm remains committed to quality gameplay, innovation, and upholding the traditions of excellence it has maintained in its eleven-plus years of top-notch game development.