Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell is a series of award-winning
stealth video games, the first of which was released in 2002, and their tie-in novels. The protagonist,
Sam Fisher, is a highly trained agent of a fictional
black-ops sub-division within the
NSA, dubbed "Third Echelon". The player controls Fisher to overcome his adversaries in levels (created using Unreal Engine) that were extended to emphasise light and darkness as gameplay elements. All the
console and PC games in the series were critically acclaimed, and the series is commercially successful. The series, along with
Assassin's Creed, is considered to be one of Ubisoft's flagship franchises, selling more than 31 million copies as of 2011.