Ubisoft games are known to reference other Ubisoft games, connections I’ve enjoyed spotting and posting about on this site. I recently thought I spotted a great Splinter Cell reference in Far Cry 5. I was excited but unsure. Turns out I was wrong, but I’ve been marvelling for the past week about how easy it is to believe something you want to think is true.
For about a decade, the actor Michael Ironside voiced the role of super-spy Sam Fisher in Ubisoft’s Splinter Cell series of stealth games. He played Fisher in all of them except the most recent one in 2013.
Last week, while I was playing a review copy of Far Cry 5, I thought I heard Ironside in the game. I found a man near a dock, an older-looking white guy, who was ostensibly there to teach my character how to fish. He sounded like Ironside. He said the word “fisher”. He talked about guns at one point. (You can hear him for yourself in the clip above this post.)
Those were the arguments for.
The argument against was that Ironside is not listed in the game’s credits. I asked Ubisoft what the deal was. After all, they have playfully connected their s. Why not bring back Ironside to talk about fishing?
Alas, a Ubisoft rep told me in an email, “Michael Ironside is not in the game.”
I also noticed that there were other fishing-related characters at other docks in the game. They all sounded the same. They all had that gruff Ironside-ish tone. They weren’t all older white guys, though. Sometimes they showed up as black men.
And sometimes they didn’t use the word “fisher,” but just verbally meandered about the wonders of fishing. I wonder if I’d have even thought of Ironside if my first encounter with the voice of the character was when it was coming out of the mouth of a black man and was speaking some of his many other lines.
It’s funny how your mind will fill in the blanks.
No Ironside, though, so I’m saying there’s no Sam Fisher reference in Far Cry 5. Now about the game’s apparent allusion to Firewatch…
Comments
6 responses to “I Was So Sure I Heard Sam Fisher In Far Cry 5”
Don’t bother clicking the video on this article, it has no audio of the NPC in question, it’s just a bizarre copy-paste of the article text in an extremely slow slideshow that runs for 4 minutes. In fact, that’s all this channel “Jessi Hahn” seems to do, is copy article text from articles he didn’t write into subtitles on a slideshow.
The actual video doesn’t seem to be on Youtube, but you can see it here on the Kotaku US site.
@alexwalker You might want to remove that video from the article here, too.
That was fucking weird. I got impatient and started reading the article and I’d already read it.
I thought it was pretty self-serving for Totilo to make that video, but it turns out he didn’t?
Clicked on video. Was met with incredibly annoying music. Stopped instantly.
Pretty… Strange article this one. Seems more like a private shower thought than a basis for something ppl would want to read.
Speaking of voices, pretty sure one of the recurring hired hands is voiced by Jason Lee. When ever I hear it I get a mash up of Mallrats and My Name is Earl…..