The Rainbow Six Invitational is a tournament going on right now for the latest Tom Clancy military shooter. So of course the event needed to have real life operators on stage to drill home just how bad ass the whole thing totally was.
The event’s host, Matt Andrews, was really pumped about the whole thing. “They actually helped with the motion capture and the military design,” he shouted.
Professional sports like football have a longstanding relationship with the military. The Defense Department pays out millions to have patriotic events during games and of course putting your hand over your heart for the national anthem at the start of a baseball game is so normal no one even bats an eye.
Competitive gaming doesn’t do subtle though, so esports like Rainbow Six Siege need to have masked agents decked out in all kids of random gear toting fake guns around to help keep things grounded in the reality that inspired them.
The game itself has been called “disturbingly real.” Fortunately, I don’t think anyone will be saying the same about the faux-Rainbow Six operators flexing their guns on stage in Montreal.
As a game, Rainbow Six Siege is based around two competing groups of players, where one is tasked with deactivating a bomb or freeing hostages while the other tries to play defense. Part of the strategy involved comes from picking which operators to play a match as since each has different pros and cons. As Ubisoft, the game’s publisher, put it in the marketing materials,
“Do you prefer the brute force of a shotgun over the control of a rifle? What about said shotgun paired with the destructive power of a massive sledgehammer? Each of the classes in Rainbow Six Siege, dubbed Operators, comes locked and loaded with his or her own special tool...”
But Rainbow Six Siege’s tenuous connection to reality was enough to fool Ron Paul, or at least one of his staffers. Last year, the former Congressman posted a picture of the game’s operators on Facebook alongside a critique of the FBI. After watching stuff like this though, I can’t blame him.