Russian-Georgia conflict predicted by Ghost Recon

by Ross Miller { Aug 14th 2008 at 4:00AM }

Tom Clancy might be this generation's Nostradamus. Although off by about three months, the first level in 2001's Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon is eerily familiar to the past week's events, where Russia and South Ossetian rebels have been fighting with Georgia. Unlike Ghost Recon, however, there has been no signs of US special forces armed with technologically advanced firepower and controlled by a mysterious "player."

Scholars are already sifting through The Great Texts in anticipation of any potential conflicts in 2014 Mexico City.

[Via Game Politics]

Tags: georgia, ghost-recon, graw, russia, tom-clancy

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)

abib @ Aug 14th 2008 4:14AM

it's Tom Clancy.. a military 'expert'. but still, good prediction.

Steven M @ Aug 14th 2008 4:18AM

I can already hear Jack Thompson packing his bags to move to Russia, so he can defend Russia's "Video games taught me to do it" defense.

Badger_badger_badger @ Aug 14th 2008 12:53PM

Jack Thompson joke not funny, sorry.

rTwelve [xbl:chilblane] @ Aug 14th 2008 2:43PM

black text disagrees

Kayel @ Aug 14th 2008 4:25AM

Actually John got there first in Revelations

Frosty22 @ Aug 14th 2008 8:13AM

It is "Revelation" without the "S".

Kayel @ Aug 14th 2008 12:25PM

You remind me of a catholic school teacher I once knew.

MarMar @ Aug 14th 2008 4:41AM

I feel bad for Turkey. Constant war in Iraq to the south, constant fighting and quarreling in the Balkans to the northwest, insanity in iran and Afghanistan right nearby, crazy Greeks on Cyprus, Kurdish rebels acting up, and now Russians invading Georgia right next door too! What a terrible spot in the world to have a county -- it's no wonder the Byzantine Empire was pwned so bad.

tc @ Aug 14th 2008 6:48AM

hard to tell if some of this is actually a coincidence considering the US weapons in turkey.

MarMar @ Aug 14th 2008 7:06AM

They're in NATO but I don't think the U.S. really has that much power or influence over them. They wouldn't let the 4th ID launch from their soil to invade Iraq, they've been fighting our buddies the Kurds, etc.

The whole region is really confusing to me. I'm shocked that the U.S. navy or the Euros have zero-presence in the black sea and that its like a Russian water park. You'd think they'd have a carrier group around the area near istanbul to respond to situations like this since there's so many flashpoints in the caucus on balkans! I mean, we have like 3 carriers around Korea and probably more in the Persian Gulf... That seems to me like Darth Vader parking 2 death stars over a single planet!

I'm not saying btw that we should have intervened in Georgia, but certainly we should have had U2s, fighter patrols, etc. near at hand so that we could have kept an eagle eye on everything going on there so we could throw down a packet of photos to the Russians at the UN and be like "Withdrawn, eh?" instead of having to wait hours and hours for confirmation from fog of war or whatever.

Wiinterfang @ Aug 14th 2008 9:08AM

History repeats itself.

That's why israel is always take away for the jews.

Tmoney @ Aug 14th 2008 1:24PM

@MArMar - The whole region is really confusing to me. I'm shocked that the U.S. navy or the Euros have zero-presence in the black sea and that its like a Russian water park
------------------

The reason the US and most likely Europe have no ships in the black sea is because of {From the WSJ}"Navy officials said that any navy excursion to the Georgian black sea coast would be restricted by a 1936 convention governing the size and type of navel vessels that can pass through the Bosporus."

The navy had wanted to send their main hospital ship to help the Georgians but even that is banned. (too big? or unwilling to send without escort?)

Korova Pamplona @ Aug 14th 2008 5:33PM

i dont know, the Byzantine empire stood from 300 to 1400 ad, which is 1100 years. There arent many countries that have been ruled for that long by basically the same administrative entity. It was a good run, all in all. But they did get pwned in the end. We still live in post-Byzantine age.

MarMar @ Aug 14th 2008 5:59PM

dont get me wrong, i have the highest respect for the Byzantines and I think their miraculous longevity is owed to the fact that they were such a gifted and clever people

trotskylite @ Aug 14th 2008 4:42AM

if you actually pay attention to the actual state of the world this conflict should come as absolutely no surprise.

rv @ Aug 14th 2008 9:49AM

From initial Ap reports I read, it seemed as though the Georgians mobilized first. Don't bite off what you can't chew, I guess.

Mr Khan @ Aug 14th 2008 12:49PM

Yeah, this conflict has been waiting to happen since the fall of the Soviet Union. Immediately after the breakup, Abkhazia and South Ossetia declared independence, and secured military independence with Russia's help

As Georgia's been trying more and more to assert itself against the Russians, and getting closer to America, they figured they could put their military back in control, and that we would somehow materialize more of our troops to help them out

Russia went a bit overboard in response, but Georgia's arrogance is what got them into this

BigD145 @ Aug 14th 2008 1:46PM

Russia did not go overboard. Have you ever looked at a map of South Ossetia? It only shares one small border with Russia (North Ossetia) and is laced with rivers. There's one road in and the capital is way down at the south end. The place is difficult to defend.

Pajama_Man @ Aug 14th 2008 4:44AM

I say a game more eerily familiar is Operation Flashpoint: Cold War Crisis (similarly released in 2001) of course the dev.s for the game were base in the Czech Republic.

MarMar @ Aug 14th 2008 7:09AM

oh no! 1 is down! this is 2! taking command! oh no, 7 is... down!

where are you?

8! report status?

oh now! 8... is down!

eldee @ Aug 14th 2008 4:51AM

the original ghost recon was bad ass. the GRAW games were pretty, but they really lost a lot of the awesomeness of the original.

Obie @ Aug 14th 2008 8:17AM

Agreed, I loved Ghost Recon, but GRAW feel like a different game than past GR's.

Luke @ Aug 14th 2008 9:40AM

Ghost Recon 2 and summit strike were my favorite.

343 Guilty Fart @ Aug 14th 2008 1:18PM

I could play GRAW 1 and 2 all day, I wish there were dozens more missions. There's just such a great feeling you get when you snipe some poor schmuck from a kilometer away in the middle of night. Love it.

Neuromancer @ Aug 14th 2008 3:30PM

Ghost Recon rocked, I hear instead of another GRAW they may go back to their roots for their next game. I hope so...

ice~ @ Aug 14th 2008 5:05AM

where are our US splinter cells when we need em???

Vladeon @ Aug 14th 2008 12:43PM

yeah, next thing you know, Sam Fisher will be out there in T'bilisi looking for missing CIA agents and keeping the Georgian president from engaging in ethnic cleansing while invading a neighboring country.

ice~ @ Aug 14th 2008 3:12PM

And then he'll get delayed a bajillion years :)

GenBanks @ Aug 14th 2008 5:37AM

Well, Tom Clancy deals mainly in plausible scenarios, which is what helps make his books so entertaining. I guess he's even better at identifying conflict fault lines than we expected!

James @ Aug 14th 2008 5:48AM

I'm now cowering in fear of a nuclear bomb going off in Baltimore. :(

Erwos @ Aug 14th 2008 6:57AM

Good news - it'll go off in Denver, according to the book!

xGeneral DEATHx @ Aug 14th 2008 10:24AM

*Waves to Denver, smiling*

Sorry, guys! See ya!

Vorbis @ Aug 14th 2008 5:59AM

Haha i noticed this before and glad to have it to link to people now. Although in the intro its russians who are trying to restore the soviet union, which isn't so true.

GenBanks @ Aug 14th 2008 6:54AM

Russians trying to restore the power and prestige of the Soviet Union, which seems accurate to me... What claim does Russia have if it is not grounded in their past Empires. Russia seems to be increasingly trying to assert itself over neighbours like Georgia, Ukraine and Belarus, which strikes me as nostalgia for the glory days of Russian power.

Vorbis @ Aug 14th 2008 6:59AM

Well it was Georgia who attacked first, but im not getting into that...

MarMar @ Aug 14th 2008 7:15AM

there was a really good explanation on NPR yesterday about what's going on out there. The gist of it if I remember right is that in the Soviet era, Georgia was kind of like the "Florida" of the Soviet Union... All the rich fellows had all their fancy dachas down there... and so these ex-Soviet lackeys who are now capitalist oligarchs were not amused that the place achieved independence after the break-up. The key thing, too, is that these Ossetians that the Russians are protecting as if they're ethnic Russians are NOT ethnic Russians -- they're Ossetians. They're a group related to the Persians and descended from the Scythians and Russia just issued them citizenship in the past 10 years as an excuse to say "look! they're Russians! we're defending them!" It's incredible stupidity -- just like women who lie about their weight on their driver's license and think that it magically means they weight that much!

john @ Aug 14th 2008 7:17AM

Or maybe they are retaliating for the genocide that Georgia did in South Ossetia
http://www.osradio.info/

Robotochan @ Aug 14th 2008 7:44AM

www.osradio.info is in Moscow so more like a propaganda tool than informative...

Bob @ Aug 14th 2008 1:29PM

I've yet to hear any unbiased reporting on this war. Boths sides have been cast as "aggressors" or "victims". The reported actions of both countries were anything but innocent.

Korova Pamplona @ Aug 14th 2008 5:43PM

the unbiased reporting is that the Georgian president is an idiot. He started a war with a country whose actual military is bigger than the whole military-age male population of Georgia.

Everything else they say about Russia, Georgian democracy, US, oil pipelines and ethnic conflict is basically accurate. Its a difficult situation there, but Georgian president badly miscalculated. If he is the best we got over there, US interests are in trouble.

Chase @ Aug 14th 2008 6:10AM

Also, Pac-Man is a harbinger for human evolution and the eventual war with ghosts.

True fact.

Vii @ Aug 14th 2008 6:30AM

Aren't we forgetting that the first level in Splinter Cell takes place in Tbilisi. Which is where the airport in Georgia is located.

sum0199 @ Aug 14th 2008 6:42AM

There must be tons of games where Russian rebels/dissidents/resurgent Communists invade country X as an excuse for the player to kill Russians, something that has become difficult to justify following the end of the Cold War.

JimmyStewart @ Aug 14th 2008 7:15AM

Is it really considered a prediction? The fighting between Georgia and Russia has been going on for decades at this point.

It would be almost as accurate to say Call or Duty predicted WW2 or the war in Iraq.

ForbidenMaster @ Aug 14th 2008 8:17AM

Well if COD had come out in 1932 and predicted that the war would start some time in July of 1939 (or better yet Sep.), then yeah, it would have been a prediction as well.

Its fiction, and always will be fiction, but there is no denying that the guy knows his stuff.

JimmyStewart @ Aug 14th 2008 9:02AM

Yeah, I'm not denying Tom Clancy knows his stuff, though I am curious... does he write the plots for his games?

What I am saying is that the conflict between Georgia and Russia has been going on for decades. I don't really think it's predicting much to make a game based around two countries actively fighting with one another... it's not a prediction it's reality. It's already happened prior to this, hence my comments about it being like predicting WW2. It will surely continue to go on. Even after that skirmish ended Russia and Georgia continued to make threats towards each other back and forth for years leading up to the more recent troubles.

Call me crazy but it's not a huge leap to make a game focusing on two countries who have been at each others throats for so long... it would be like predicting trouble between Israel and Iran. These aren't predictions, they're the world we've been living in.

Rii @ Aug 14th 2008 7:31AM

Of course Debt of Honor (1994) featured a Japanese airliner crashing into the US Capitol building...

ForbidenMaster @ Aug 14th 2008 8:11AM

And a war against Iraq and Iran.

And if you want a real blast from the past about what our tech will be like in the next few years read NetForce. The dude for all intents and purposes predicted the emergence of the iPhone in the proper time frame. Tom Clancy is one guy who really knows how to do his research.

PS. Video chatting was so over hyped back in the day.