Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six (video game)
Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six is a 1998 tactical shooter video game developed and published by Red Storm Entertainment for Microsoft Windows, with later ports for the Nintendo 64, PlayStation, Mac OS, Game Boy Color, and Dreamcast. It is the first installment in the Rainbow Six series. Based on the Tom Clancy novel of the same name, the game follows Rainbow, a secret international counterterrorist organization, and the conspiracy they unravel as they handle a seemingly random spike in terrorism.
Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six (video game)
A screenshot from the PC version depicting AI-controlled teammates moving into position during a mission
Tom Clancy (pictured here in 1989) conceptualized Rainbow Six and co-founded Red Storm Entertainment, but had minimal involvement in the game's development.
Tactical shooter is a sub-genre of first- and third-person shooters, associated with using strategy, planning, and tactics in gameplay, as well as the realistic simulations of ballistics, firearm mechanics, physics, stamina, and low time to kill. Dating back to strategy games from the late 1980s, the genre first rose to prominence in the late 1990s with the releases of several well-received tactical shooters. The popularity of the genre saw a decline in the late 2000s as fast-paced "arcade"-like action shooters rose to prominence, it has seen a revitalization since the mid-2010s with the successful releases of several modern tactical shooters.
Arma 3 (2013) is a modern example of a tactical shooter and a milsim. Variants of it are also used by real militaries for military simulation training.
Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six (1998) has been considered "the first true tactical shooter".