Happy 20th anniversary Call of Duty!

With all of the hubbub around Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III and it’s ensuing beta, you might have missed a special trailer at the start of NEXT. Call of Duty has reached it’s 20th anniversary, something pretty special in the games industry. October 29th is the official day, but we wanted to celebrate a little early. Below are the trailers for each Call of Duty game, along with a few special facts about each (Thanks to the Call Of Duty Fandom site for those, and TV Tropes)!

The NPD Group named Call of Duty the eighth-best-selling computer game of 2003. It maintained this position on NPD’s computer game sales rankings for the following year. In the United States alone, Call of Duty sold 790,000 copies and earned $29.6 million (~$38.8 million in 2021) by August 2006.

In the promo trailer/opening of the game, Sgt. Moody was saying: “Medic, over here now!”, although he didn’t appear in the game.

Call of Duty 3 was developed in only 8 months.^[2] Melee fights are unavoidable except when the player can quickly throw a grenade near the German about to fight the player before entering the room (confirmed on PS2 and Xbox 360 in the “Night Drop” mission of the British campaign).

The game is featured in the film Kick-Ass. The titular character enters an apartment where Rasul, a character he was asked to talk to, is playing split screen online with one of his friends.

If the player shoots off an enemy’s head they will still scream, even though they lack a head. Any time the player takes too long to move, kill, or destroy an objective, grenades will be thrown at them constantly, especially on Veteran.

In Battlefield: Bad Company 2, Sweetwater references Modern Warfare 2 by replying “They’ll just send in some special ops douchebags with pussy-ass heartbeat monitors on their guns, instead of us.” to Sarge after he suggests reporting of an HVT to the command. This is apparent as the two games were in concurrent development, and Cliffhanger was shown early in the E3 conference including the aforementioned.

Treyarch employed a motion capture technology similar to the one used in James Cameron’s Avatar film, which captures the whole performance of the actor, as well as allowing accurate facial expressions.^[12] The teaser trailer narrator is nowhere to be found within the actual game but his lines are used by different characters, Dragovich: “When he regains consciousness double the voltage.”, Hudson: “We need to bring back,” and Reznov: “The pain is difficult, isn’t it?”.

In the cutscene at the beginning of the last level “Dust to Dust”, there are pictures of some of the targets earlier in the game. If players look at the right time, the cutscene shows a close up photo of Lev Kravchenko, stated to be taken on October 29th, 1945. There is also picture of Joseph Allen, but it uses a different character model from No Russian and it only shows the bottom half of the picture.

In the main menu, the background will often change, depending on how far along the player has progressed in the story. If the player has finished the story, they will be shown the default background, which is the Briefing Room in the USS Barack Obama.

Considering this was a next-gen title, there are major differences between Xbox One/PS4 and Xbox 360/PS3 as well as the Wii U version. Graphics have been enhanced on Xbox One/PS4. On PC, just like in the previous games in the series, there are customizable graphical options including the option to use Motion Blur, despite being used during in-game cutscenes. Also, on Xbox 360, the game splits into 2 discs. Disc 1 is the game itself and Disc 2 is to install the Campaign part. This is also the same case with Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare. Also, the game is forced to 16:9 widescreen if the standard 4:3 screen format is used. The Wii U version, like Call of Duty: Black Ops II and all of the Call of Duty titles released on the Wii, has Wii Remote & Nunchuck support. Despite this, this was the final Call of Duty game released on the Wii U.

In the original ending of the game in Terminus, after locking their exoskeletons, Irons would state that for a movement to be effective, it requires a “martyr” while guiding the player’s arm and weapon towards his head before taking his own life by forcing Mitchell to pull the trigger.^[12][13]

The Collector’s Edition for the game was originally going to feature a Ray Gun replica, but was ultimately replaced by the Juggernog Mini-Fridge.^[23]

At the end credits it says “No robots were harmed in the making of this game“. This is a callback to previous Infinity Ward games that ended with “No cows were harmed in the making of this game“.

Sledgehammer Games consulted with World War II historian Marty Morgan for this game and Call of Duty: Vanguard, assisting them in their research and studying of material, including traveling to key points throughout Europe and traveling routes taken by soldiers in order to capture the essence of the war and make it as authentic as possible.

Originally the game was going to have a asymmetrical story campaign where teams of two would compete to complete various objectives in a Quicksand Box with branching paths depending on the winner of the match. However, many testers felt it was too repetitive and got boring fast and was scrapped late into development, forcing Treyarch to attempt to redo the campaign in the style of past games (story-driven missions with setpieces).

Barry Sloane takes on the mantle of Captain Price, succeeding Billy Murray. The voice team even loved Sloane’s audition so much they dropped the pretenses, scribbled on the script to use Price’s name instead of the pseudonym they were using for audition purposes, and had him read the lines knowing he was auditioning for Price.

Development of Warzone started in 2017, under the name “Magma”, after Infinity Ward and Raven Software witnessed the rise in popularity of PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds. The mode was originally set in Kabul, Afghanistan before the studios settled with Verdansk.^[16]

Black Ops Cold War was originally supposed to have a physical collector’s edition which included a small photo camera similarly to the one used during the mission Redlight, Greenlight.

Vanguard was originally conceived as a full-on alternate history game inspired by Wolfenstein: The New Order, showing resistance to Nazi occupation following a German victory in World War 2. This likely accounts for the game’s more pulpy, over-the-top tone and significantly reduced adherrance to historical accuracy. It was changed to its current form mid-development as Activision wanted to tie the game in with the new Modern Warfare series and the Black Ops series in a sort of shared universe.

The Bryson 890 is based on the Mossberg 590M, a variant of the 590 (which itself is already featured in the game as the Bryson 800) that loads from detachable box magazines, as denoted by the M. However, its magazine well, as well as its standard and extended magazine options, are taken from the Molot Vepr-12 self-loading shotgun^note . There is indication in the 890’s internal name, mviktor (Molot Vepr), that the weapon was in fact originally supposed to be the Vepr-12, be part of the AK platform and unlocked by levelling up the RPK, but given that would’ve led to the platform having seven family members, it is likely that the plan was scrapped and weapon was instead retooled as a Mossberg 590 variant. An as-close-as-possible approximation of the Vepr-12, the “KV Broadside” would be added into the game as part of the Season 2 update.

Nothing crazy, just that after around six months as Warzone 2.0, Warzone went back to being simply “Warzone”.

Given Modern Warfare III hasn’t even released yet, it’s tough to find any fun facts on it. In any case, the beta has made plenty of fans happy with movement changes, TTK, and the return of fan favorite maps. We’re all are excited for November 10th.

Stay tuned to GamingTrend for more Call of Duty news and info!

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