Are You Ready For War? How Call Of Duty Took Over The Planet

How Call Of Duty took over the planet…

You may play Call of Duty in your living room — But as gaming franchises go, it’s a global phenomenon – with this month’s Modern Warfare 3 set to become the biggest entertainment release of all time. This is the story of a first-person shoot ’em up with a difference – one that has ruined social lives from Chichester to China, and made shedloads of cash in the process...

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Eight years ago, Call Of Duty, a WWII-set first-person shooter, was released on the PC by Activision with relatively little fanfare. CoD is the world’s biggest gaming brand, played on multiple consoles with its eight installments having raked in a staggering $3bn worldwide. Its most recent outing, 2010’s terrorist-bashing Black Ops, made an unbelievable $1bn in just over a month - taking in more than Avatar in its first month - and becoming the biggest-selling videogame in history. And it’s a record that’s certain to be smashed by Modern Warfare 3. Why? Because Earth now lives and breathes Call of Duty.

Call of Duty in numbers

• 317 million: killed each day playing CoD, which is more than the population of America.
• 1,100,000,000,000: shots fired by Call of Duty gamers since Black Ops launched last year. That’s roughly four times the number of stars in the Milky Way.
• $100m: money spent on marketing for Modern Warfare 3.
• 98m: Call Of Duty games sold worldwide.
• $300m: predicted first-day takings for Modern Warfare 3.

How realistic is Modern Warfare 3?

MW3 has the most intricate, terrorist-laden storyline CoD has ever coughed up – but are they on the money with some of their ideas? The military says “Just maybe, yes…”

In MW3, you’ll fight two key battles before events see war unleashed. You begin as a soldier battling the Russians in NYC. Then a Russian ultra-nationalist will attempt to unsettle the peace process – meaning you’ll be sent in to stop him. But what’s the likelihood of this series of events taking place in real-life? Brigadier Dennis, ex-commander of 2nd Battalion in the Princess of Wales’ Royal Regiment, explains…

Russia attacks the USA

“It would be highly unlikely for the Russians to have belligerent intent against the West without us knowing,” explains Dennis, who served in Germany, Northern Ireland and the Falkland Islands. “The West’s relations with, and intelligence on Russia has improved greatly since the Cold War, so we would stop a conflict years before it escalated to this. That said, using Special Forces to remove jamming towers is something we’ll be seeing much more of on future battlefields [the US military does this in MW3 to impede the communications systems of their enemies, before launching a counter-attack]. There is now a fourth dimension to ground, air and sea warfare: cyber.”

Urban warfare

The game’s attention will later shift to Germany where players push back an advance by Russian armoured divisions through its streets. But for Dennis, this is a definite long shot. “Warfare nowadays is very different to the high-end, kinetic battles of previous global conflicts. Most sophisticated armies place their emphasis on not getting into a conflict in the first place. So they jam satellite signals to stop those groups deploying in the first place. So something would have to go seriously wrong for two tank divisions to be going head-to-head in the streets. But I can see why the game’s designers have done this. It’s far more interesting to be fighting on the streets than trying to hack someone’s computer.”

Trouble on the London Underground

In one of MW3’s most tense missions, gamers take on the role of an SAS operative tasked with stopping the delivery of a WMD to a London dockyard. The mission then culminates with an epic firefight on the London tube. “The only thing I’d alter about this picture is replacing the SAS with a counterterrorist unit of the Metropolitan Police force. Because it’s unlikely the SAS would get involved at this stage. But that’s not to say these Met officers wouldn’t be armed – they know a terrorist cell only has to get lucky once to achieve its goal, so there are hundreds of police and intelligence personnel working full-time to smash terrorist rings. Out of all the situations mentioned so far though, this would be the most likely – perhaps minus the huge firefight on the London Underground.”

Brigadier Richard Dennis is now an advisor to Force Select, a specialist recruitment agency that puts ex-armed forces personnel back in to work (forceselect.co.uk).

From the December 2011 issue of FHM India.