Highest Rated Comments


MichaelIronside1880 karma

I think it's a great idea for Ubisoft. They've gone to motion capture, and this spring I will be 65 years old. I don't think anyone wants to pay money seeing a 65 year old Sam Fisher bounce around on set, killing and stumbling while he kills people. I wish them all the luck. I hope that franchise has a long and storied future.

I have to confess I'm not a gamer. And when they sent me the contract for the very first game, it was quite lucrative, and I said "absolutely, I will do this." I thought it was going to be like PONG, and I would just have to introduce it.

My wife, actually, went out and bought a brand new SUV with some of the money.

When I got the script, it was very stiff, very inflexible, and very blood and violent.

And I didn't want to do it. And told them I was going to give them back their money. They asked me what would it take to keep me on the project, and i said we would have to change the character, and give him some type of humanity. To their credit, they sat me down with the game creators, and we came up with the present Sam Fisher, who had an empathy and was not just a 2 dimensional killing machine. And we got as much humanity, I think that that format will allow.

And my wife didn't have to give back her SUV.

ALso, what happened is, when you're doing games, usually it's one person in a booth doing their work, creating their character, and then the next person goes in, you usually never get to work or meet anybody. On the first 2 games, we brought the cast in, and we all did it together, so we had a sense of humanity. That was one of my stipulations.

I said "Working is like making love, if i do it by myself, it's just masturbation. I'd rather have the other cast around." And I think the proof is in the pudding, the game has had a pretty good set of legs on it.

MichaelIronside1080 karma

One of my favorite memories of Arnold at the studios in Mexico City is while shooting, my sister back in Canada had had a cancerous growth in her abdomen that had choked off her intestines, and she was in intensive care after it was removed, and was very very fragile, her health was very fragile. And I had been calling her on a daily basis to see how she was doing, because I"m the oldest of 5, she's the second oldest, and she's my oldest and dearest friend. And Arnold noticed me calling every day at lunch and he said "Who is it you're calling?'

And I told him about my sister, and he said "C'mon, let's go to my trailer."

And he had one of these conference phones set up, and he called my sister, and we talked to my sister, in Peterborough, Ontario, for an hour.

My sister recovered. And that's just the kind of guy Arnold is.

MichaelIronside997 karma

He went through a whole diet thing with her. He told her the healthiest diet she should be on, for her surgery recovery, and he had a wealth of knowledge what was possibly affecting the tumor, and different chemicals and stuff.

And I gotta honestly say - I'm not trying to pump him up - but he changed the course of my sister's recovery. She seemed lighter, and had more of a sense of humor after that. Felt less isolated. Less insulated. Isolated and insulated, you know?

He called her a couple more times on the phone. He called 2 or 3 more times to check on her.

MichaelIronside977 karma

I came in once, many years ago when my oldest daughter was dating, and there was a fellow sitting on our couch with his feet up on the coffee table. And I walked up behind him, and said "Do you live here?"

And he said "No sir."

And I said "Do you plan on living here?"*

And he said "No sir."

And I said "Well, get your feet off my coffee table, get your ass off my couch, and go wait outside."

He left.

MichaelIronside935 karma

Ubisoft should be given a bit of a hat's off to start with. When Splinter Cell was created, it was breaking new ground, and their allowing me to create the character and renovate the script for the game is quite phenomenal, and in a paranoid, financially-tight market, I have to share the credit with Ubisoft and the five owners. It was quite brave what they did in taking those risks.