Very few video games have truly changed the way we play. The likes of Half-Life, World of Warcraft, and Fortnite are once-in-a-generation shifts. October 2023 marks the 20th anniversary of one of those seismic games: the original Call of Duty. What began as an attempt to beat Medal of Honor at its own game turned into a monolithic franchise with over 400 million sales across 30 different games. It was a significant turning point for both FPS campaign design and online multiplayer, ushering in an era of cinematic set pieces and ladder-based progression. Call of Duty was, undoubtedly, the FPS that changed shooters forever.
The tale of Call of Duty can, technically speaking, be traced back to the Second World War, the conflict out of which the series formed its bedrock. But it was not the war itself that birthed Call of Duty so much as the movies that emerged from it. And so the true starting point for its story is not a mission but a man: a director called Steven Spielberg.
During his days making the war epic Saving Private Ryan, Spielberg would often watch his son play GoldenEye 007. This sparked an idea for a video game that could be both educational and entertaining. The result was Medal of Honor, released in 1999 for the original PlayStation. But both it and its sequel, Medal of Honor: Underground, focused on small-scale infiltration missions. For the third game in the series, publisher Electronic Arts had ambitions of something much grander: D-Day.
It was clear that if Medal of Honor was going to achieve the scale and intensity of Spielberg’s beach landings, the next game needed greater horsepower. And so Electronic Arts contracted Oklahoma-based studio 2015, Inc. to create the PC-exclusive Medal of Honor: Allied Assault. A number of new hires were made for the project, including Mackey McCandlish, Jason West, and Vince Zampella. It wasn’t obvious to anyone at the time, but this was the moment the seeds of Call of Duty were sown.
To create the grander tapestry of war, 2015 wanted to move away from the intelligence agency focus of the original Medal of Honors. Their infiltration missions had always pitted the player solo against entire German battalions. For Allied Assault, the clue was in the title: the player needed allies.
“There was a theme of being part of a squad being explored,” recalls Mackey McCandlish, who was a level designer at 2015, Inc. “Like opportunities to meet up with characters. And that was something that was very personal to me before I even got there. This idea of friendly characters being with the main character.”
McCandlish references the second mission of Allied Assault, in which you meet up with an SAS officer, Jack Grillo, who guides you through the level. Grillo points out searchlights and instructs you to run at the right time in order to avoid their paths. “It's almost like a very early primitive, primordial version of what would come later with following McMillan through [Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare’s All Ghillied Up mission],” says McCandlish. “To me as a game developer, it was like, ‘Can I get the player to follow along and take part in a play with another character?’”
When 22 of 25 people leave and start a new company, they're not doing it because they want to.
By surrounding the player with AI-controlled squadmates, 2015 could provide the sense of camaraderie that fuelled the most powerful war movies. Combined with the power of the PC, enough on-screen troops could be deployed to properly depict the herculean effort of the Normandy beach landings. And so Allied Assault became the first significant depiction of D-Day in FPS history.
As development neared its end, it appeared that Allied Assault was going to be successful in its goals: it was an immersive war story with unprecedented scale. But while the game was looking good, life at 2015, Inc. proved increasingly difficult. Unsatisfied with their contract with EA, three core members of the team – Grant Collier, Jason West, and Vince Zampella – decided that they were going to jump ship to set up their own company. News of this venture, which would come to be known as Infinity Ward, spread throughout the studio. Many of the trio’s colleagues – including McCandlish – felt the same way and wanted in.
“The game didn't ship until January 22nd. We were already at Infinity Ward by January 5th,” says McCandlish. “So we'd go and work on the last few bugs and then we'd jet off to [nearby restaurant] Peppers, and like, ‘Hey, we're starting a new thing, right?’ And every week at Peppers there'd be another person there.”
“It's like when 22 of what, 25 people leave and start a new company, they're not doing it because they want to,” he says. “They're doing it because that situation is too tumultuous to continue.”
Infinity Ward was an opportunity for a clean start. When the team sat down to plan out their first game, their initial ideas were a far cry from the Western Front. Pitches for a sci-fi shooter and even a first-person mediaeval fantasy spellcaster were on the table. But Infinity Ward’s new publisher, Activision, encouraged the team to start with what they were comfortable with. And so it was back to World War 2 once more for another PC exclusive. Internally, they called this game the “Medal of Honor Killer”.
“Jason [West, Infinity Ward’s engineering lead] used to say, his through line for making Call of Duty was, ‘Let's do all D-Day all the time,’” says McCandlish, who joined Infinity Ward as a programmer. “So that was a high bar to set. Burnville was one of the first levels we did, and we were trying to put guns going off in the sky, paratroopers coming down, explosions, hills dynamically turning into craters where an explosion happened, MG42s opening up. All as just a run-of-the-mill level.”
It was in this idea that Call of Duty’s signature intensity was born. But the most important lesson Call of Duty would take from Allied Assault wasn’t the ferocity of D-Day’s guns and artillery. It was the AI squad members who lent the mission that feeling of hard-fought sacrifice.
“It's ‘No one fights alone,’” McCandlish explains. “You feel like you're a squad, which goes back to those early explorations in Medal of Honor really coming to fruition where there's always friendly characters around you, talking with you. They're able to die. More of them are always coming on from some other offscreen point, creating that feeling all around you of you're in a war and it's real.”
By doubling down on what began in Allied Assault, Infinity Ward used a vastly increased number of squad members to lend Call of Duty its unique wartime flavour. Where classics like Doom, Half-Life, and the original Medal of Honor always cast the player as a lone gunman, Call of Duty could significantly adjust its tone through the use of supporting characters.
“I think that feeling of activity in a living world really differentiated what we were making,” observes McCandlish. “But I don't think it was because we looked at other games and said they could be more living. It's more like we watched a lot of Band of Brothers.”
“Something Jason [West] used to always talk about is that Half-Life makes you feel like they have smart AI because you hear, ‘Let's throw a grenade,’ and then a grenade goes donka, donka, donk [McCandlish mimics a bouncing grenade]. It's like, ‘Wow, I can't believe he did that.’ He didn't do that. You hit a trigger, a designer spawned a grenade at an angle and it feels amazing.
“And so is there some actual logic going on? Of course there is. But is there a lot of careful attention to emotion and evoking an emotion? Yes. Was there an intentional emotion to achieve? Yes. Where did it come from? More likely it came from moments in film than it did from other games.”
When you start with film, you end up with these really tricky and interesting challenges to design for.
That filmic influence is clear from the moment Call of Duty begins. The campaign initially follows the journey of the American 506th, the parachute regiment depicted by HBO’s groundbreaking Band of Brothers. Later, the perspective shifts to the British to follow their efforts in sabotaging the Eder Dam of Dambusters fame. And the final third recreates the terrifying Battle of Stalingrad, which was directly influenced by the 2001 film Enemy at the Gates.
“When you start with film, you end up with these really tricky and interesting challenges to design for. What does it mean to go play a shooter where you got ammo instead of a gun?” McCandlish refers to the scene in Enemy at the Gates in which Russian soldiers are handed ammunition instead of rifles, with the expectation that they will take the gun of a fallen comrade. It’s a scene Infinity Ward replicated in unforgettable fashion for Call of Duty.
“You're not going to get there working straight from game design,” McCandlish continues. “You're getting there because you're trying to achieve a feeling in a moment and it hadn't been done before. How do we make the player end up with ammo and not make that feel scripted?”
“When you are in Modern Warfare 2 and you're rescuing Captain Price and he's going to come in and punch you, the controls still respond to your motions,” notes McCandlish. “When you're taking the shot on Zakhaev [in Modern Warfare’s One Shot, One Kill mission], the wind affects the shot so that he doesn't die when he's not supposed to die. But it doesn't feel like a script happened to you. So making all of those moments feel cinematic means you still feel engaged. If you're riding the boat in Stalingrad [in Call of Duty] and you don't crouch when the planes go by, you're going to get shot and killed. You can't just put the controller down, you have to be engaged.”
This approach, to make the scripted feel authentic, generated Call of Duty’s now-iconic cinematic DNA. Every mission is anchored around a set piece that lets you live through a war movie’s biggest, most exhilarating moment. Just a few years earlier, Half-Life had raised the bar for shooter storytelling. Call of Duty didn’t so much surpass that bar than it did hurl it into an explosion that launched it into orbit. This was something entirely different; the popcorn to Half-Life’s cheeseboard. And people loved it.
Call of Duty launched on October 29, 2003 to glowing reviews. Despite being released late in the year, it became the eighth best-selling PC game of the year in the US. It might not yet have been the sure-fire Medal of Honor killer, but Infinity Ward had clearly made something special. And so it was clear what must be done: make another one.
Activision quickly began spinning Call of Duty into a wider franchise. While Infinity Ward got to work on a full sequel, another developer - Grey Matter - was brought in to create an expansion pack that took Call of Duty’s campaign to brand new places, including a mission set inside a B-17 Flying Fortress.
But Activision knew Call of Duty couldn’t stay on PC. Spark Unlimited, another studio formed by Medal of Honor veterans, was contracted to create Call of Duty: Finest Hour, a console game that acted as something of a companion to the PC original. Released a year after the first game, it received more muted reviews than its sibling, but worked as a stop-gap while console players waited for the real thing: Infinity Ward’s second album.
Call of Duty 2 arrived in 2005 as a launch title for the Xbox 360. As far as sequels go, it was relatively traditional; the same intense action approach, but with better graphics, thicker atmosphere, and higher-fidelity explosions. It saw the team revisit the Normandy beach landings for the first time since Allied Assault, and on its sands we can see the evolution of Infinity Ward’s cinematic ambitions laid clear. But behind the sequel’s iterative improvements was a studio trying to work out what its next significant step would be.
“We wanted to make a game that was more non-linear,” McCandlish recalls. “We felt like we solved this linear thing. And that experimenting went on a little too long and led to more going back and trying to salvage what we could and retreat back to linear.”
At the time, nonlinear was the most important buzzword in video games. But it wasn’t the right step for Call of Duty; this was a series that thrived on cinematic direction. Infinity Ward knew it was time to move forward in one way or another, though, and if that change wasn’t structure, then it was setting. The team wanted its third game to pull the series out of the 1940s and bring it into the modern day.
“We had wanted to explore modern from the early days,” says McCandlish. “And there was also a very functional side to [wanting a modern setting]. It's like, how many closets can I spawn bad guys from? Can I bring a helicopter in to bring some reinforcements? So can I put an attachment on a gun? There were things we wanted from the modern era that we couldn't do [in the 1940s].”
Activision had other plans, though. Recognising its growing success, the publisher wanted to cement Call of Duty as an annual franchise. That meant work on Call of Duty 3 had to be finished within the year. It was a timeline that simply couldn’t accommodate Infinity Ward’s new ambitions; the team needed a full two years. And so the developer and publisher came to an agreement; Infinity Ward could have its two years, but Treyarch – a studio that had made a Call of Duty 2 spin-off for previous generation consoles – would make the next mainline game in time for the following year.
Activision hedged their bets by having Treyarch stay in World War 2 and, from their perspective, maybe even save the franchise.
Treyarch quickly became Call of Duty’s second core developer, alternating each year with Infinity Ward. Its first two games in this set-up – 2006’s Call of Duty 3 and 2008’s World at War – remained in the 1940s while Infinity Ward set about establishing its new modern universe.
“And so Activision hedged their bets by having Treyarch stay in World War 2 and, from their perspective, maybe even save the franchise in case this whole modern thing doesn't work out,” says McCandlish, who by then was working as a design lead on Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. “So it wasn't a sure thing, but it was pretty obvious by the time we got through the first year, in that level where you have to go try to get to the tank at night, was coming together. You could see the early signs that the AC-130 mission was going to work out, and it's like, ‘Okay, I think this is going to be a thing. The old games were a thing, but this is going to be a thing.’”
And what a thing it was. Modern Warfare’s campaign is, to this day, still considered the best in the franchise’s two-decade history. When it was released in November 2007 its incredible variety of missions and set pieces – from slow-motion pistol draws to nuclear explosions – felt like the final evolutionary stage of what began back on Allied Assault’s Omaha beach. And from this point on, first-person shooter campaigns would never be the same. The cinematic touch of Modern Warfare could be felt everywhere during the dawn of the next decade, from Crysis to Halo to Battlefield. It went beyond just shooters, too; the filmic presentation of Sony exclusives such as Uncharted would likely not be what they are today if not for Infinity Ward’s ambition.
But it wasn’t Modern Warfare’s campaign that cemented it as an all time great. It was its game-changing multiplayer.
Online play has been part of Call of Duty since its inception. Cinematic campaigns may have been the focus of the first couple of games, but Infinity Ward had nonetheless tried to find a unique approach for its multiplayer since the very beginning.
“I have a lot of really positive memories of playing Call of Duty 1 multiplayer on PC,” says McCandlish. “Back then you could put 64 players plus on a server and you'd play Search and Destroy, our version of Counter-Strike. And then once you're dead, you're out.
“We didn't have kill streaks, so we didn't have unlocks and stuff,” he recalls. “It was interesting that we had that choice of when you're playing British, you're only getting British guns, which was differentiating from ‘Here's Half-Life, everybody gets every gun, here's Quake, everybody gets every gun.’ So I think it had its own flavour.”
Modern Warfare was an opportunity to try a new flavour, though. And Infinity Ward went bold. Despite Halo’s evolution of the Quake-style multiplayer arena reigning supreme in the early 2000s, the team planned something radically different. They reconsidered how almost every component of Call of Duty’s online suite worked. The most significant innovation was progression; instead of the old design of choosing from a selection of pre-determined weapons before you spawn, Modern Warfare asked players to improve their personal loadouts over time by climbing an XP ladder of increasingly exciting guns.
“It may seem obvious now that ‘Oh yeah, you unlock guns,’ but internally that was very divisive,” McCandlish says. “It's like, ‘No, you can't do that. You’ve got to earn your guns in shooters.’ Or ‘You’ve got to have fairness of guns.’ You can't have an unfair advantage at the beginning, but we went with it and it worked.”
“And then on top of that, of course, unlocks and perks, which is a Fallout thing,” McCandlish reveals. “And in Fallout, the perk usually has a good side and a bad side of the coin. So we [said] ‘Eh, we don't need the bad side as much,’ but we will keep this idea of creating your own character from the collection of positive characteristics you want for your character. And that also helped define the game and set it apart from the games at the time.”
Perks provided something of an RPG layer to the multiplayer; skills that aided and improved particular combat approaches. Combinations of perks and weapons formed classes; customisable loadouts tailored to specific playstyles. They allowed players to build their perfect soldier, tweaking and tuning them as each XP milestone unlocked a new piece of equipment. There was always something to strive for, always another option to experiment with. You could be a fast assault scout today, but the following week you could be a steadfast sniper.
“It's a really personal journey of unlocking stuff,” McCandlish says. “And it's nice because it gets you to play stuff you wouldn't normally play. It's I think the designer's job to encourage the player to get out of their comfort zone a little bit without turning them off from the game. And the unlocks in those games [did that], even to the point of like, ‘Hey, throw all your stuff away and start up again.’ That was a last minute untested idea on CoD 4: ‘Hey, what if we let you Prestige?’"
This new progression system would give players a reason to stick with Modern Warfare long-term. But to ensure people would come to Call of Duty in the first place, Infinity Ward had to completely rethink the style of multiplayer gameplay that it offered.
“The interesting choice going from Call of Duty 2 to 4 is that we finally gave up on the idea that we were making a better version of Counter-Strike,” admits McCandlish. “We said, ‘You know what, our players just want to play Team Deathmatch. Is there anything we could do to make Team Deathmatch something we want to play too?’
“The solution there was to try to find a way to carrot players, to reward them for playing a little bit more like they would in a single life mode like Counter-Strike. And the way to get there was the Killstreaks, where ‘Hey, I've got two or three kills, now I have a reason not to just go run into the next person.’ There's a little bit of stakes there.”
Almost every one of Modern Warfare’s innovations has continued in one form or another to this day.
Killstreaks provided increasingly powerful rewards for scoring multiple kills without dying. Score three in a row and you could activate a UAV to scan for nearby enemies. Five in a row called in an airstrike. And then there was the jackpot: score seven kills and you could deploy an attack helicopter that would tear apart the enemy team. These abilities were quite literally game-changing, and have remained a vital part of Call of Duty multiplayer ever since. In fact, almost every one of Modern Warfare’s innovations has continued in one form or another to this day. It laid the seemingly unshakable foundation for one of the most important online games of the current era.
The importance of that formula could be felt from the very beginning. Modern Warfare was released in November 2007 and by the following January had sold over 7 million copies. Impressively, despite launching against the long-awaited titan that was Halo 3, Modern Warfare was the number-one played game on Xbox Live by the start of 2008. Infinity Ward had undeniably created a phenomenon.
16 years later, we can see the broader impact that Modern Warfare had. The reward loop is a fundamental part of almost every multiplayer game in existence, be that a traditional XP ladder or its modern evolution, the battle pass. Classes and loadouts may have since fallen out of vogue, replaced by MOBA-inspired heroes, but customisation remains the undercurrent that powers so many online games today, especially in an era of microtransaction cosmetics. In short, Modern Warfare was a game changer.
Modern Warfare owes its lineage and evolution to the original Call of Duty. 20 years ago, Infinity Ward created a shooter that it hoped would transport players into Hollywood’s war movies of the past. And, in doing so, it shaped the future of video games forever.
Matt Purslow is IGN's UK News and Features Editor.
Continue reading...
The tale of Call of Duty can, technically speaking, be traced back to the Second World War, the conflict out of which the series formed its bedrock. But it was not the war itself that birthed Call of Duty so much as the movies that emerged from it. And so the true starting point for its story is not a mission but a man: a director called Steven Spielberg.
During his days making the war epic Saving Private Ryan, Spielberg would often watch his son play GoldenEye 007. This sparked an idea for a video game that could be both educational and entertaining. The result was Medal of Honor, released in 1999 for the original PlayStation. But both it and its sequel, Medal of Honor: Underground, focused on small-scale infiltration missions. For the third game in the series, publisher Electronic Arts had ambitions of something much grander: D-Day.
It was clear that if Medal of Honor was going to achieve the scale and intensity of Spielberg’s beach landings, the next game needed greater horsepower. And so Electronic Arts contracted Oklahoma-based studio 2015, Inc. to create the PC-exclusive Medal of Honor: Allied Assault. A number of new hires were made for the project, including Mackey McCandlish, Jason West, and Vince Zampella. It wasn’t obvious to anyone at the time, but this was the moment the seeds of Call of Duty were sown.
To create the grander tapestry of war, 2015 wanted to move away from the intelligence agency focus of the original Medal of Honors. Their infiltration missions had always pitted the player solo against entire German battalions. For Allied Assault, the clue was in the title: the player needed allies.
“There was a theme of being part of a squad being explored,” recalls Mackey McCandlish, who was a level designer at 2015, Inc. “Like opportunities to meet up with characters. And that was something that was very personal to me before I even got there. This idea of friendly characters being with the main character.”
McCandlish references the second mission of Allied Assault, in which you meet up with an SAS officer, Jack Grillo, who guides you through the level. Grillo points out searchlights and instructs you to run at the right time in order to avoid their paths. “It's almost like a very early primitive, primordial version of what would come later with following McMillan through [Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare’s All Ghillied Up mission],” says McCandlish. “To me as a game developer, it was like, ‘Can I get the player to follow along and take part in a play with another character?’”
When 22 of 25 people leave and start a new company, they're not doing it because they want to.
By surrounding the player with AI-controlled squadmates, 2015 could provide the sense of camaraderie that fuelled the most powerful war movies. Combined with the power of the PC, enough on-screen troops could be deployed to properly depict the herculean effort of the Normandy beach landings. And so Allied Assault became the first significant depiction of D-Day in FPS history.
As development neared its end, it appeared that Allied Assault was going to be successful in its goals: it was an immersive war story with unprecedented scale. But while the game was looking good, life at 2015, Inc. proved increasingly difficult. Unsatisfied with their contract with EA, three core members of the team – Grant Collier, Jason West, and Vince Zampella – decided that they were going to jump ship to set up their own company. News of this venture, which would come to be known as Infinity Ward, spread throughout the studio. Many of the trio’s colleagues – including McCandlish – felt the same way and wanted in.
“The game didn't ship until January 22nd. We were already at Infinity Ward by January 5th,” says McCandlish. “So we'd go and work on the last few bugs and then we'd jet off to [nearby restaurant] Peppers, and like, ‘Hey, we're starting a new thing, right?’ And every week at Peppers there'd be another person there.”
“It's like when 22 of what, 25 people leave and start a new company, they're not doing it because they want to,” he says. “They're doing it because that situation is too tumultuous to continue.”
All D-Day, All the Time
Infinity Ward was an opportunity for a clean start. When the team sat down to plan out their first game, their initial ideas were a far cry from the Western Front. Pitches for a sci-fi shooter and even a first-person mediaeval fantasy spellcaster were on the table. But Infinity Ward’s new publisher, Activision, encouraged the team to start with what they were comfortable with. And so it was back to World War 2 once more for another PC exclusive. Internally, they called this game the “Medal of Honor Killer”.
“Jason [West, Infinity Ward’s engineering lead] used to say, his through line for making Call of Duty was, ‘Let's do all D-Day all the time,’” says McCandlish, who joined Infinity Ward as a programmer. “So that was a high bar to set. Burnville was one of the first levels we did, and we were trying to put guns going off in the sky, paratroopers coming down, explosions, hills dynamically turning into craters where an explosion happened, MG42s opening up. All as just a run-of-the-mill level.”
It was in this idea that Call of Duty’s signature intensity was born. But the most important lesson Call of Duty would take from Allied Assault wasn’t the ferocity of D-Day’s guns and artillery. It was the AI squad members who lent the mission that feeling of hard-fought sacrifice.
“It's ‘No one fights alone,’” McCandlish explains. “You feel like you're a squad, which goes back to those early explorations in Medal of Honor really coming to fruition where there's always friendly characters around you, talking with you. They're able to die. More of them are always coming on from some other offscreen point, creating that feeling all around you of you're in a war and it's real.”
By doubling down on what began in Allied Assault, Infinity Ward used a vastly increased number of squad members to lend Call of Duty its unique wartime flavour. Where classics like Doom, Half-Life, and the original Medal of Honor always cast the player as a lone gunman, Call of Duty could significantly adjust its tone through the use of supporting characters.
“I think that feeling of activity in a living world really differentiated what we were making,” observes McCandlish. “But I don't think it was because we looked at other games and said they could be more living. It's more like we watched a lot of Band of Brothers.”
“Something Jason [West] used to always talk about is that Half-Life makes you feel like they have smart AI because you hear, ‘Let's throw a grenade,’ and then a grenade goes donka, donka, donk [McCandlish mimics a bouncing grenade]. It's like, ‘Wow, I can't believe he did that.’ He didn't do that. You hit a trigger, a designer spawned a grenade at an angle and it feels amazing.
“And so is there some actual logic going on? Of course there is. But is there a lot of careful attention to emotion and evoking an emotion? Yes. Was there an intentional emotion to achieve? Yes. Where did it come from? More likely it came from moments in film than it did from other games.”
When you start with film, you end up with these really tricky and interesting challenges to design for.
That filmic influence is clear from the moment Call of Duty begins. The campaign initially follows the journey of the American 506th, the parachute regiment depicted by HBO’s groundbreaking Band of Brothers. Later, the perspective shifts to the British to follow their efforts in sabotaging the Eder Dam of Dambusters fame. And the final third recreates the terrifying Battle of Stalingrad, which was directly influenced by the 2001 film Enemy at the Gates.
“When you start with film, you end up with these really tricky and interesting challenges to design for. What does it mean to go play a shooter where you got ammo instead of a gun?” McCandlish refers to the scene in Enemy at the Gates in which Russian soldiers are handed ammunition instead of rifles, with the expectation that they will take the gun of a fallen comrade. It’s a scene Infinity Ward replicated in unforgettable fashion for Call of Duty.
“You're not going to get there working straight from game design,” McCandlish continues. “You're getting there because you're trying to achieve a feeling in a moment and it hadn't been done before. How do we make the player end up with ammo and not make that feel scripted?”
“When you are in Modern Warfare 2 and you're rescuing Captain Price and he's going to come in and punch you, the controls still respond to your motions,” notes McCandlish. “When you're taking the shot on Zakhaev [in Modern Warfare’s One Shot, One Kill mission], the wind affects the shot so that he doesn't die when he's not supposed to die. But it doesn't feel like a script happened to you. So making all of those moments feel cinematic means you still feel engaged. If you're riding the boat in Stalingrad [in Call of Duty] and you don't crouch when the planes go by, you're going to get shot and killed. You can't just put the controller down, you have to be engaged.”
This approach, to make the scripted feel authentic, generated Call of Duty’s now-iconic cinematic DNA. Every mission is anchored around a set piece that lets you live through a war movie’s biggest, most exhilarating moment. Just a few years earlier, Half-Life had raised the bar for shooter storytelling. Call of Duty didn’t so much surpass that bar than it did hurl it into an explosion that launched it into orbit. This was something entirely different; the popcorn to Half-Life’s cheeseboard. And people loved it.
Call of Duty launched on October 29, 2003 to glowing reviews. Despite being released late in the year, it became the eighth best-selling PC game of the year in the US. It might not yet have been the sure-fire Medal of Honor killer, but Infinity Ward had clearly made something special. And so it was clear what must be done: make another one.
Second Assault
Activision quickly began spinning Call of Duty into a wider franchise. While Infinity Ward got to work on a full sequel, another developer - Grey Matter - was brought in to create an expansion pack that took Call of Duty’s campaign to brand new places, including a mission set inside a B-17 Flying Fortress.
But Activision knew Call of Duty couldn’t stay on PC. Spark Unlimited, another studio formed by Medal of Honor veterans, was contracted to create Call of Duty: Finest Hour, a console game that acted as something of a companion to the PC original. Released a year after the first game, it received more muted reviews than its sibling, but worked as a stop-gap while console players waited for the real thing: Infinity Ward’s second album.
Call of Duty 2 arrived in 2005 as a launch title for the Xbox 360. As far as sequels go, it was relatively traditional; the same intense action approach, but with better graphics, thicker atmosphere, and higher-fidelity explosions. It saw the team revisit the Normandy beach landings for the first time since Allied Assault, and on its sands we can see the evolution of Infinity Ward’s cinematic ambitions laid clear. But behind the sequel’s iterative improvements was a studio trying to work out what its next significant step would be.
“We wanted to make a game that was more non-linear,” McCandlish recalls. “We felt like we solved this linear thing. And that experimenting went on a little too long and led to more going back and trying to salvage what we could and retreat back to linear.”
At the time, nonlinear was the most important buzzword in video games. But it wasn’t the right step for Call of Duty; this was a series that thrived on cinematic direction. Infinity Ward knew it was time to move forward in one way or another, though, and if that change wasn’t structure, then it was setting. The team wanted its third game to pull the series out of the 1940s and bring it into the modern day.
“We had wanted to explore modern from the early days,” says McCandlish. “And there was also a very functional side to [wanting a modern setting]. It's like, how many closets can I spawn bad guys from? Can I bring a helicopter in to bring some reinforcements? So can I put an attachment on a gun? There were things we wanted from the modern era that we couldn't do [in the 1940s].”
Activision had other plans, though. Recognising its growing success, the publisher wanted to cement Call of Duty as an annual franchise. That meant work on Call of Duty 3 had to be finished within the year. It was a timeline that simply couldn’t accommodate Infinity Ward’s new ambitions; the team needed a full two years. And so the developer and publisher came to an agreement; Infinity Ward could have its two years, but Treyarch – a studio that had made a Call of Duty 2 spin-off for previous generation consoles – would make the next mainline game in time for the following year.
Activision hedged their bets by having Treyarch stay in World War 2 and, from their perspective, maybe even save the franchise.
Treyarch quickly became Call of Duty’s second core developer, alternating each year with Infinity Ward. Its first two games in this set-up – 2006’s Call of Duty 3 and 2008’s World at War – remained in the 1940s while Infinity Ward set about establishing its new modern universe.
“And so Activision hedged their bets by having Treyarch stay in World War 2 and, from their perspective, maybe even save the franchise in case this whole modern thing doesn't work out,” says McCandlish, who by then was working as a design lead on Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. “So it wasn't a sure thing, but it was pretty obvious by the time we got through the first year, in that level where you have to go try to get to the tank at night, was coming together. You could see the early signs that the AC-130 mission was going to work out, and it's like, ‘Okay, I think this is going to be a thing. The old games were a thing, but this is going to be a thing.’”
And what a thing it was. Modern Warfare’s campaign is, to this day, still considered the best in the franchise’s two-decade history. When it was released in November 2007 its incredible variety of missions and set pieces – from slow-motion pistol draws to nuclear explosions – felt like the final evolutionary stage of what began back on Allied Assault’s Omaha beach. And from this point on, first-person shooter campaigns would never be the same. The cinematic touch of Modern Warfare could be felt everywhere during the dawn of the next decade, from Crysis to Halo to Battlefield. It went beyond just shooters, too; the filmic presentation of Sony exclusives such as Uncharted would likely not be what they are today if not for Infinity Ward’s ambition.
But it wasn’t Modern Warfare’s campaign that cemented it as an all time great. It was its game-changing multiplayer.
Online Superiority
Online play has been part of Call of Duty since its inception. Cinematic campaigns may have been the focus of the first couple of games, but Infinity Ward had nonetheless tried to find a unique approach for its multiplayer since the very beginning.
“I have a lot of really positive memories of playing Call of Duty 1 multiplayer on PC,” says McCandlish. “Back then you could put 64 players plus on a server and you'd play Search and Destroy, our version of Counter-Strike. And then once you're dead, you're out.
“We didn't have kill streaks, so we didn't have unlocks and stuff,” he recalls. “It was interesting that we had that choice of when you're playing British, you're only getting British guns, which was differentiating from ‘Here's Half-Life, everybody gets every gun, here's Quake, everybody gets every gun.’ So I think it had its own flavour.”
Modern Warfare was an opportunity to try a new flavour, though. And Infinity Ward went bold. Despite Halo’s evolution of the Quake-style multiplayer arena reigning supreme in the early 2000s, the team planned something radically different. They reconsidered how almost every component of Call of Duty’s online suite worked. The most significant innovation was progression; instead of the old design of choosing from a selection of pre-determined weapons before you spawn, Modern Warfare asked players to improve their personal loadouts over time by climbing an XP ladder of increasingly exciting guns.
“It may seem obvious now that ‘Oh yeah, you unlock guns,’ but internally that was very divisive,” McCandlish says. “It's like, ‘No, you can't do that. You’ve got to earn your guns in shooters.’ Or ‘You’ve got to have fairness of guns.’ You can't have an unfair advantage at the beginning, but we went with it and it worked.”
“And then on top of that, of course, unlocks and perks, which is a Fallout thing,” McCandlish reveals. “And in Fallout, the perk usually has a good side and a bad side of the coin. So we [said] ‘Eh, we don't need the bad side as much,’ but we will keep this idea of creating your own character from the collection of positive characteristics you want for your character. And that also helped define the game and set it apart from the games at the time.”
Perks provided something of an RPG layer to the multiplayer; skills that aided and improved particular combat approaches. Combinations of perks and weapons formed classes; customisable loadouts tailored to specific playstyles. They allowed players to build their perfect soldier, tweaking and tuning them as each XP milestone unlocked a new piece of equipment. There was always something to strive for, always another option to experiment with. You could be a fast assault scout today, but the following week you could be a steadfast sniper.
“It's a really personal journey of unlocking stuff,” McCandlish says. “And it's nice because it gets you to play stuff you wouldn't normally play. It's I think the designer's job to encourage the player to get out of their comfort zone a little bit without turning them off from the game. And the unlocks in those games [did that], even to the point of like, ‘Hey, throw all your stuff away and start up again.’ That was a last minute untested idea on CoD 4: ‘Hey, what if we let you Prestige?’"
This new progression system would give players a reason to stick with Modern Warfare long-term. But to ensure people would come to Call of Duty in the first place, Infinity Ward had to completely rethink the style of multiplayer gameplay that it offered.
“The interesting choice going from Call of Duty 2 to 4 is that we finally gave up on the idea that we were making a better version of Counter-Strike,” admits McCandlish. “We said, ‘You know what, our players just want to play Team Deathmatch. Is there anything we could do to make Team Deathmatch something we want to play too?’
“The solution there was to try to find a way to carrot players, to reward them for playing a little bit more like they would in a single life mode like Counter-Strike. And the way to get there was the Killstreaks, where ‘Hey, I've got two or three kills, now I have a reason not to just go run into the next person.’ There's a little bit of stakes there.”
Almost every one of Modern Warfare’s innovations has continued in one form or another to this day.
Killstreaks provided increasingly powerful rewards for scoring multiple kills without dying. Score three in a row and you could activate a UAV to scan for nearby enemies. Five in a row called in an airstrike. And then there was the jackpot: score seven kills and you could deploy an attack helicopter that would tear apart the enemy team. These abilities were quite literally game-changing, and have remained a vital part of Call of Duty multiplayer ever since. In fact, almost every one of Modern Warfare’s innovations has continued in one form or another to this day. It laid the seemingly unshakable foundation for one of the most important online games of the current era.
The importance of that formula could be felt from the very beginning. Modern Warfare was released in November 2007 and by the following January had sold over 7 million copies. Impressively, despite launching against the long-awaited titan that was Halo 3, Modern Warfare was the number-one played game on Xbox Live by the start of 2008. Infinity Ward had undeniably created a phenomenon.
16 years later, we can see the broader impact that Modern Warfare had. The reward loop is a fundamental part of almost every multiplayer game in existence, be that a traditional XP ladder or its modern evolution, the battle pass. Classes and loadouts may have since fallen out of vogue, replaced by MOBA-inspired heroes, but customisation remains the undercurrent that powers so many online games today, especially in an era of microtransaction cosmetics. In short, Modern Warfare was a game changer.
Modern Warfare owes its lineage and evolution to the original Call of Duty. 20 years ago, Infinity Ward created a shooter that it hoped would transport players into Hollywood’s war movies of the past. And, in doing so, it shaped the future of video games forever.
Matt Purslow is IGN's UK News and Features Editor.
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