Call of Duty’s exciting story has backstabbing, betrayals, takeovers, breakaway factions, a determination to succeed no matter what the cost - and that’s just the developers. The series has earned over three billion dollars in seven years, which is more money-for-killing than every hitman in the world. And some of the smaller armies. Lets look over the highs and lows of one the best-selling series in the history of shooting other countries in the face.

We’ll start with a Metacritic roundup of all the games.

You may notice a slight up-down trend. Let’s look closer.

Call of Duty (2003) 91%

For younger gamers: that thing in the lower right is called a “health bar”, and we hated it.

The original and not-best, because that’s the way series should be: starting with a good idea and then getting better instead of running it into the ground. Built on the Quake III engine, the first Call of Duty was a huge success, and you’ll still find people playing CoD servers despite seven games and nine years between then and now. It won Infinity Ward multiple Game of the Year awards, and set the course of the company for the rest of the decade.

Call of Duty: United Offensive (2004) 87%

Now we have textures as well as polygons!

If the popularity of Call of Duty defined Infinity Ward’s approach to making great games, United Offensive defined Activision’s determination to milk it- even if that meant getting someone else to make a less-great game. United Offensive servers are certainly fun, an assortment of extra levels for enemies, multiple, for the shooting of, but by bringing in other companies (Gray Matter Interaction and Pi Studios) Activision proved early on that they cared nothing for IW’s ownership of the series. The reduced score showed the effects, but the continued sales meant Activision didn’t care.

Call of Duty 2 (2005) 86%

A brave soldier, a rifle, and no health bar! Regenerative health will win this war!

Back with Infinity Ward for a true sequel, but Call of Duty 2 was the first to show signs of a major new factor in PC game design: the fact that it was really XBox game design.  CoD2 was a spectacularly successful Xbox launch title, and this early on the console-cannibalization of the series the PC version didn’t suffer. The review scores did, dropping by 5% from the first game, but that’s probably due to World War II fatigue - by now videogamers had spent far longer in that conflict than everyone who actually fought it put together, and as a setting it was becoming played out. A lesson Infinity Ward would learn, but Activision wouldn’t.

Call of Duty 3 (2006) 0%

So how are we meant to aim these things with a thumbstick, sarge?

Treyarch’s first main entry in the series, and one which showed their complete and total contempt for PC gamers. Call of Duty 3 was released for every games console in the world except the PC (that silly machine where the series began, the one with the “mouse” - you know, the best controller for shooting games.) This gives it an effective PC metacritic score of sweet Frag All. Treyarch made the game based on their experience, and that experience was making “Call of Duty 2: Big Red One” for the consoles. AKA “Copying Infinity Ward’s stuff for money because Activision told us to.” Call of Duty 3 showed the same level of innovation, in the same way the Sahara shows the same sea level as the Gobi desert, keeping the series stuck firmly in the mud of the war.

These extras were brought in because Infinity Ward had all these crazy awkward ideas like “You can’t make anything more than a level pack in a year” and “We’d like to release appreciably better games, not the same game for more money.”

Modern Warfare (2007) 94%

What it felt like to be a rival shooter at the time

Back with the real developers and the real series: great success! Call of Duty 4 invigorated the series like three lightning bolts turbocharging an espresso machine, giving the series a fresh setting, an engrossing story, and creating a multiplayer mode that’s as near as possible to an MMOFPS. Modern Warfare servers are still busy, always, and the ModWar mode allows private servers to customize their playstyle.

The closest anyone could come to insulting the game was the idiotic XBox World 360 complaining that it didn’t revolutionize the genre. Which was like complaining that the fountain of youth serves crappy drinks because you still have to drink with your mouth.

World At War (2008) 83%

When a game’s addition is “TANKS!”, that game is good

Let’s be clear: World at War servers are some of the best World War II shooting you’ll find - there are weapons from all the major factions, you get to level up your skills and perks (Treyarch copying from IW’s work example number five hundred), and it’s a lot of fun. But we’re still back in the bloody war, again, despite Infinity Ward demonstrating that everyone loved not being there. One of the few aspects of warfare players share with actual veterans. Treyarch are great programmers, but they’re about as imaginative as vanilla-flavored ice-cream knock-knocking on a chicken crossing the road. The aggregate score fell over ten percent, proving IW right in getting out of the World War business.

Modern Warfare 2 (2009) 85%

The clue is in the title - instead of another innovative upgrade to the series, IW pumped out a sequel to the previous game. One so obvious (and so demanded) that they didn’t even bother with a new name, just sticking a 2 on the end of the title. Which is as close as the authors of a series can come to being sarcastic since they’ve basically called their own game “Call of Duty 4, 2.” They couldn’t be admitting it was any more unoriginal if they found it in Treyarch’s photocopier.

This is where the real problems set in, with Activision basically firing Infinity Ward after making one of the best-selling games in either company’s history so that they wouldn’t have to share the money. For more information on that, please refer to any gaming website ever. For more evidence of the growing problems with the series, note how Modern Warfare 2 doesn’t allow private servers. Which is basically the company saying “Don’t get any ideas about playing this for long - we’ll have another game next year.”

Black Ops (2010) 82%

We’re back with Treyarch, back with dropping scores, and back with treating PC players like foul-smelling hobos. This game featured the the amazing piss-take that was restricted private servers: the ludicrous idea that while you could rent “private” servers, you could only rent them from the one company allowed by Activision. Which proves that as well as photocopies of every scribble the good IW employees made while they were in the building, Activision also have a a radically different dictionary from the rest of the English-speaking world. This company then gives more of your money to Activision, pumping up the price for less than no extra service, and keeping strict controls on what you were allowed to do on “Your” server. It did at least feature Treyarch finally moving on to a new setting, albeit only after Infinity Ward did it. So, standard Treyarch, then.

As if to counter this daring departure from the norm, they kept to their main norm twice as hard. The norm of “releasing a giant paycheck, sorry, ‘game’, every year no matter what the cost.” The cost in this case was game-breaking multiplayer lag on the PC (call us finicky, but if we were going to restrict our entire game to one set of servers we’d at least make sure those servers worked), broken graphics on some PS3-TV combinations, and generally a sense that if the release date had arrived any earlier they’d have sold the game boxes for $60 with an “IOU one game” note inside. The game has been brutalized on user-review sites like amazon, despite scoring 82% on metacritic. But it’s not like a series now built on immense hype and gigantic advertising budgets would ever do anything to affect official reviewers.

Summary

Short form: Call of Duty games good, Infinity Ward ones great, and the best bit is how games stay good as long as people want to play them. From the die-hards on original Call of Duty servers to the series’ apex of Modern Warfare, it’s all still online for you to jump in and play. While we all wait to see what Infinity Ward are legally allowed to make next, and whether the next CoD will even be playable.

Cries of joy substituted for shellfire across the servers last night, as millions of Allied troops celebrated victory in World War II for the three thousand and sixty-fifth time that day.

“It’s been a hard struggle” said Sergeant Martin, who first answered the Call of Duty in 2004 (and again in 2005, 2006, and once more in 2008.)  “Those dirty Huns sure are persistent, and seem to keep reappearing five-to-seventeen seconds after you kill them, but by God we pushed forward and stood on the designated map marker for thirty seconds.  Thereby resolving the entire nightmarish tangle of debts and international pressures which drowned a quarter of the world in blood.”

The Reichstag Falls (127.7 times per hour)

“We fought for this one,” agreed Private Brigs, surveying the streets of dod_avalanche - now silent as combatants rested and checked their kill/death ratios.  “When I think of the millions of deaths in this struggle - several thousand of them my own - I can only hope future generations remember what it is we did here, and why.”

The spirit of Private Jones, reincarnated into a Wolfenstein server by the intensity of the combat (and the dynamic vertex-based anchored animation technology of the  modified Quake III graphics engine) reported confusion over the victory.  “In my day, we just shot them,” he complained.  “I don’t recall ever watching a timer and shooting them three seconds later to do more damage.  Most peculiar.”

Red Orchestra units on the Gazala Line were too busy to comment as a three-man team is required to move each tank effectively, though many gunners were heard to comment on “balancing” of the Allied and Axis units” - removing any incredible technical superiority one side may have had, for example - had helped with the American victory.  Did they say American?  Sorry, they’re sure they meant Allied and no disrespect for the millions of British, Russian, Australian and other nationalities who carried the bulk of the fighting.

“It’s strange, mankind seems to keep fighting these same senseless wars over and over again,” said Martin, visibly tensing for the resumption of hostilities.  “And I don’t mean wars of greed, or fear, or against those who look different.  I mean these exact wars.  I’ve taken part in Market Garden so often I’ve left a furrow, and I’m thinking of bringing a bucket and spade for the next time through the Normandy beaches.  Desperately fighting for survival there is beginning to get a bit samey.”

“We can only hope that future generations will live in peace,” he concluded, hurrying to reload the Thompson which has been rendered by seven different graphics engines in the time he’s used it.  “That they’ll understand the importance of brotherhood, and respect, and basically not calling people you’ve never met stupid noob faggots for no reason.”

Video games have come a long way in forty years - the average controller has more buttons than the first computers, and the internet connects you to so many people Nintendo are terrified to let you do anything but press “A”.  But what does the future hold for those of us who live in online game servers?  What do we want from future technology?

1.  A wargame where jumping like a tazed rabbit doesn’t confer a tactical advantage

The Call of Duty series creates an incredibly realistic environment, equips you with authentic weapons, has graphics so advanced that ghillie suits work, and then prances all over that with players leaping like turbo-boosted kangaroos.  The only way a marine could jump that high in full kit is by standing on a claymore, and in real life, a terrorist whose panic reaction to an MP5 is jumping?  He’ll be that soldier’s “funniest confirmed kill I ever had”.

On CoD4 servers you can be killed by expert players who bounce and crouch like fast-forwarded gymnasts.  An amphetamined-Mario couldn’t keep up with them.  You’re pouring machine gun fire right into them, and when they land behind your corpse after a triple inversion somersault you expect them to score 6.0 for Grace, 5.9 Agility, and 0.0 in Realities of War.  Halo servers technically suffer this problem even worse, with ten-tonne armored space marines leaping like they have trampoline-simulators in their futuristic space boots, but the great thing about cyborg soldiers fighting a race of space-mushrooms is that it never claimed to be realistic.

2.  Mice which administer electrical shocks to people who miss five times in a row but still play Sniper