Splinter

Summer Game Fest season is almost upon us, and you know what that means. That’s right, it’s time for Ubisoft to once again disappoint Splinter Cell fans by reminding us that it’s been almost four years since the remake was announced.

“Splinter Cell fans are getting excited about a possible update on the remake in June,” I wrote in April—except that was April 2024, not 2025, and June 2024 ultimately brought us nothing. We did hear about a Splinter Cell animated series on Netflix, not featuring the voice of Michael Ironside, and then in November of that year the Splinter Cell movie starring Tom Hardy that was announced, appropriately, in 2012 was officially given the Sam Fisher handshake.

Prior to that? The “full remake” of Splinter Cell was revealed in December 2021, a year later we were told it was being re-written “for a modern day audience,” and then a month after that the director quit. So, not exactly setting the world on fire there.

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And what do we have today? Blasted across the Ubisoft social media accounts, complete with emoji and #SplinterCell hashtag, it’s Sam Fisher himself! And boy, he looks none too happy.

(Image credit: Ubisoft (Bluesky))

The obvious implication is that Ubisoft has some sort of Splinter Cell news cooking for the near future, perhaps to be revealed at the Summer Game Fest showcase, or a Ubisoft Forward event that hasn’t yet been announced.

But I have concerns that we are in fact being set up for yet more disappointment, and not just because Ubisoft has been pulling this shit for the better part of a decade now. (PC Gamer’s Fraser Brown said he was convinced “Ubisoft is just tormenting fans” with elaborate trolling all the way back in 2020.)

The real reason I expect this to end badly springs directly from the image Ubisoft shared today. Here’s the alt-text: “Close-up of Sam Fisher from Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, showing a stern expression with focused eyes, short dark hair, and a rugged beard, set against a blurred high-tech background. He’s locked in.”

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There’s just one, well, wee tiny little problem: As sharp-eyed fan Naveen Chandar pointed out, “Isn’t that from the opening cinematic of Pandora Tomorrow, and not Chaos Theory?” And you know what? It absolutely is.

Here’s Sam from the Pandora Tomorrow cinematic—it’s cropped, and lower resolution, but it’s the same picture.

(Image credit: Ubisoft (Bluesky))

Look, mistakes happen, I get that. And honestly, at this point I kind of love the idea that this is all just an incredibly long-game troll—that somebody on Ubisoft’s social media team hates Splinter Cell with a blazing-hot passion that’s driven them to run a decade-long guerrilla harassment campaign against fans of the series purely out of spite. That would be funny! (Never forget that Julian Gerighty literally did this, in 2019.)

But more pragmatically, man, if Ubisoft doesn’t even know which game their teaser images come from, I can’t say it gives me great faith in its ability to put together a whole actual game within the span of years I have left on this Earth.

This is Chaos Theory Sam, by the way:

(Image credit: Ubisoft (Bluesky))

So that’s where things stand: The summer showcase season is almost here, Ubisoft is teasing Splinter Cell again, it’s not sure which game is which, and optimistically, maybe we’ll see Sam Fisher in Fortnite before the year is out. Or, maybe, we’ll get a whole new game—maybe this time it’ll actually happen! Look, I might be jaded and cynical, but I’m also a sucker. And I really do want to play that Splinter Cell remake.

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