Back in 2008, Tom Clancy sold his name to Ubisoft. That is, he gave them the right to use his name for any video game or related product, royalty-free, FOREVER, in exchange for an undisclosed sum of money.

That’s kind of an odd situation. Usually if a celebrity licenses their name for use on a product, there are strict limits on what they can do, and the company will have to renew the license for subsequent products… but that’s not what happened in this case.

Even stranger, we’re still getting brand new Tom Clancy games right now – even though he died back in 2013.

I wrote about the saga of the Tom Clancy brand in PCGamesN, take a look:

The bizarre tale of how Tom Clancy sold his name to videogames

One of the most interesting aspects is that a generation is likely to grow up not really knowing who Tom Clancy is – except for the fact that his name is on their favourite video games. I wonder how many teenagers think Tom Clancy is a developer at Ubisoft?