Cursed for some unknown slight, Far Cry 2 and Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory designer Clint Hocking has been doomed to wander the game Earth until the second coming of Ouya. Since leaving Ubisoft Montreal after FC2, he’s joined then left LucasArts, Valve, and Amazon Game Studios. As curses often compel people to, he’s come full circle.
Hocking today announced that he has joined Ubisoft, this time their Toronto studio. What he’s working on is a mystery, but he seems keen to set down roots.
Clint Hocking has been cursed by a witch and is now doomed to travel the games industry, joining new developers and then leaving before releasing a single game. In the last five years, the Far Cry 2 designer has joined and left LucasArts, joined and left Valve, and as of yesterday, joined and left Amazon Games Studios.
RPS Feature From The Archive
Every Sunday, we reach deep into Rock, Paper, Shotgun’s 141-year history to pull out one of the best moments from the archive. This week, we re-visit Kieron’s Dark Futures series, which spoke to the leaders of the immersive sim. This is part five, an essay written by Clint Hocking.
Clint Hocking’s career started with sending his resume into Ubisoft Monreal “on a lark”. Six week’s later, he’s working on the original Splinter Cell, ending up as a designer/scriptwriter. After its enormous success, he rose to the position of Creative Director on Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory and Far Cry 2 before leaving this year to chase new horizons. Away from his game design, he’s a prolific essayist on his own blog. And in keeping in that, rather than a traditional interview, Clint has wrote us an essay…
RPS Feature Retrospective
You shouldn’t always give people what they want. This is focus testing’s fatal flaw. It’s also the reason that Far Cry 2 – a game which doesn’t give you what you want and slaps you for asking – is the best game in the series by far.
Clint Hocking, he of Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory and Far Cry 2, has departed from Valve after eighteen months working as a something or other designer and level designer. Meanwhile, Gabe Newell has been talking to noted videogame blog The Washington Post about the company’s structure and strategy. Observant readers will notice that this post contains two pieces of Valve news but not a shred of concrete information about any games in development. I reckon that’s why Hocking left – he designed a couple of levels every week but couldn’t find any games to put them in. After trying to drop a few into DOTA 2 when nobody was looking, he eventually left the building with a bag full of digital architecture.
The internet has decided that a picture on Clint Hocking’s twitter feed of his son at Valve’s industrial heart is confirmation that the Far Cry 2 designer is now absolutely definitely working for the Half Life honchos and most probably turning Episode Three into a work of divisive genius that throws out the baby and the bathwater, and then replaces them with something far more awesome than a tiny, dirty human. Maybe he’s just consulting, maybe he’s visiting a friend, but as he left his post at Lucasarts a couple of weeks back for “something new” the internet may well be right on this one. So, Clint Hocking is now lead designer of all development at Valve.
While he’s most known for the rightfully divisive Far Cry 2 (me, I’m glad it exists but never, ever want to play it again), Clint Hocking is a fascinating games-brain whose trajectory is well worth following. Not purely because he played a big role in the first three Splinter Cells, but also because interviews and talks suggest a restless, ambitious mind that seems taken up with the sort of emergent, open world, experimental experiences we generally crave here on RPS. So, while a bit odd, the news two years back that he was joining LucasArts was rather exciting. With Georgey-porgey’s bunch having lately dropped any number of balls both in terms of Star Wars and, well, anything else, Hocking’s presence was surely just what this hobbled giant needed. Only now he’s bally left without any projects coming to light.
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