Rainbow Six Siege's Secret Lore Will Blow Your Mind

3. Formation And Reformation

An important distinction to be made right off the bat is that, while Siege itself is a 'reboot' of the Rainbow IP, it still follows on from the events of all those older Clancy titles. The story goes that the team were deactivated circa 2010, a full eleven years on from their formation, before being reactivated by the new 'Six' (played by the criminally underused Angela Bassett) in 2014.

To provide the briefest of summaries on the development of Rainbow, the team were formed in 1999 by leading members of NATO's special forces. More interesting, however, is the man who took the initiative on the team - John Clark, who was played by Willem Defoe in the 1994 adaptation of the Clancy novel, A Clear and Present Danger. In the following years, Rainbow would be deployed all over the globe, with their last missions coming in 2008 in the Las Vegas strip. (A further operation, Patriots, is confirmed to have "gone south" shortly after.)

In any case, the new Six decides to reform the team as a response to a threat known as The White Masks around 2014, recruiting from a new set of operators in order to do so.

No one knows what's happened to the old bunch, sadly. The Clancy-verse continuity has proven difficult to discern since the releases of Splinter Cell: Blacklist and Ghost Recon: Wildlands, and with Siege sadly lacking a genuine single-player mode, it remains unlikely that Ubi will produce more story-driven content in the future.