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.
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.
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?”
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.
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.
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Matt Purslow is IGN’s UK News and Features Editor.