In “Gun Metal Gaming: A 2009 Retrospective,” Wolfman Jew covers one game from 2009 a month for all of 2024. Each is one he’s either never played or played for only a few forgotten minutes well over a decade ago; he’s coming into these about as fresh as a player can. Hopefully, his experiences will give us a good view of one of gaming’s lesser years.
Thanks to Cart Boy for edits.
“Yesterday you were a soldier on the front lines. But today, front lines are history. Uniforms are relics. The war rages everywhere. And there will be casualties. This man Makarov is fighting his own war and he has no rules. No boundaries. He doesn’t flinch at torture, human trafficking, or genocide. He’s not loyal to a flag or country or any set of ideals. He trades blood for money. He’s your new best friend.”—General Shepherd, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2
By the time 2007 ended, gamers and critics were eager to name it the greatest year gaming had ever seen. The Wii had risen to stratospheric heights after its 2006 launch, living large with the impeccable Super Mario Galaxy, the delightful Metroid Prime 3, and the dizzying WarioWare: Smooth Moves. Mass Effect deftly wove space opera role-playing with cinematic aspirations, and Uncharted provided much more Hollywood style. The Orange Box gave us Team Fortress 2 and Portal in one fantastic collection. Assassin’s Creed put a historical, open-air twist on the stealth-em-up. Rock Band and skate radically reimagined their genres. Pokémon Diamond & Pearl got a Stateside release, while back in Japan, Apollo Justice and Professor Layton buffed the Nintendo DS catalog. BioShock brought the immersive sim into the mainstream. Crysis and S.T.A.L.K.E.R. took hardcore PC shooting in wild directions. And then there was Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, which thrust a series of World War II simulators into the War on Terror in a way that was mesmerizing, dynamic, and relevant. It was, undeniably, one hell of a year.
Image: Steam. A screencap of Call of Duty 4 from Steam. The rest of the images are taken from my playthrough of Modern Warfare 2, but it’s worth giving an idea of the first game (in a less time-consuming way than uploading my disc and doing it myself).
But there were cracks, not unlike a giant one in the disc I bought off Ebay for today’s article. Halo 3, a behemoth with more pre-release hype than any other game of that year, was a slog. Meanwhile, Prime 3 was a great shooter but took so much inspiration from Halo that it often felt lost as a Metroid. Assassin’s Creed’s sequels shed its contemplative tone to become shallow content farms. Wii Play foretold the Wii’s depressing future. God of War II was the best of Kratos’ “Greek Saga” but is so crass and psychotic as to seem almost obscene today. No More Heroes flopped in Japan; it’d need to wait for a 2008 U.S. release to finally give Suda51 his cult audience. A negative review of Kane & Lynch got Jeff Gerstmann fired from Gamespot and implied ugly truths about the leadership of a major gaming news site. And as the original “The Citizen Kane of video games,” BioShock’s pretentious twists inspired the phrase “ludonarrative dissonance” and symbolized a painfully self-conscious shift in gaming discourse. In the second chapter of this series I linked to a Rock, Paper, Shotgun article about the 2007 Spike Video Game Awards, the predecessor to today’s Game Awards. I recommend it again as an example of what art once meant to this industry. What “the best year in gaming” once meant.
Image: Source Gaming. This fairly standard pre-mission briefing in Modern Warfare 2 pretty accurately embodies a lot of film techniques of the era. You’re almost attacked by tons of information, a lot of it largely useless, and it’s all about sifting through it at a lightning fast pace.
Modern Warfare exemplifies both ends. Infinity Ward made a sumptuous FPS with varied level design, impactful set pieces, and an extremely cool tutorial that recommended a difficulty based on your performance. The multiplayer was cracking by all accounts; its Perks adopted RPG trappings so successfully that it fully upended how online multiplayer worked. And more than anything else, it truly captured the confusion and information overload of the 21st Century, as you’re constantly bombarded by stimuli: sound, image, and jumping perspectives. For much of the 2000s, the entertainment industry was skittish about depicting the “war” part of the War on Terror, whose tropes and disasters didn’t snap to classic war dramas. Works about the Bush Administration’s culture of jingoism, prejudice, and anxiety either actively perpetuated it or hid their criticism in allegory, but the wars themselves were barely touched. This was no less true for the games industry. Without an obvious leader, Call of Duty 4 was free to define the idea of a post-9/11 war game. Arguably, it defined the idea of a post-9/11 war story, extending beyond its medium to eclipse the likes of The Hurt Locker and Generation Kill.
Image: Source Gaming. Seen here in Modern Warfare 2 is the night vision, a famous addition of Modern Warfare 1. Adopting Splinter Cell and spy imagery made sure that you knew this was a modern game.
But Modern Warfare was also a game that tasked players with calling clinical, unsettlingly realistic airstrikes on ill-defined targets. It featured a scene where your sidekicks torture a man at a time when the American government was defending the abuse (the series would return to this trope with dozens of torture sequences). Its enemies were a hodgepodge of Arab and Soviet caricatures, and it’s hard to ignore that this was a cynical, racist lurch just as much as it was a trailblazing visionary. Most unsettling in retrospect was its cozy relationship with the U.S. military, even if it showed American intervention as dangerous and often incompetent. It wasn’t the most problematic game to comment on the War on Terror—if you really want tasteless, Fugitive Hunters for PS2 ends on a Tekken bout with Osama bin Laden. But this was the game that codified how video games would explore conflict of the 21st Century, and it did so by depicting war crimes so slickly that they passed you by. Was it criticism? Endorsement? Both? Most journalists were too enchanted by the grittiness to ask, not unlike how Tom Clancy’s success came from crafting a false veneer of authenticity. Thanks to accurate military jargon, real world guns that were effectively product placement for arms manufacturers, and a direction inspired by war cinema and news coverage, CoD4 seemed realer than any game before.
Image: Source Gaming. Call of Duty has always prioritized an idea of “realism,” but the Modern Warfare games took it further. The first one got the series an M-Rating for the first time for its blood, painstaking efforts are taken to show accurate objects, and a cynical, jaded perspective took over. Killing these guys—whose connection to the bad guy was totally lost on me—is just part of the job.
And it worked; the game usurped Halo as king of the FPS playground and catapulted the series into a higher echelon of wealth and power. As perhaps the defining product of the era of Gun Metal Gaming, it also symbolized a demand within the culture that every sequel be bigger than the last. Growth, endless growth, was endemic to the way games were made and discussed. Every new game needed to be bigger, louder, longer, more cinematic, more problematic, more successful, more packed with stuff than the last. To go small was the way of cowards. And although 2008’s Call of Duty: World at War tried scratching that itch with some truly gruesome violence, just one year later Infinity War made something that perfectly epitomized this trope.
Image: Source Gaming. Modern Warfare 2, a masterclass of graphics and sound design, marshals its resources to create something bombastic, loud, and rather ugly.
That would be Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (which I reviewed later than every other entry in this series due to having to buy a second copy off Ebay. That first disc made my Xbox whine in agony). Free from the original games’ focus on historical World War II battles, this got to be a traditional sequel. Jumping off Modern Warfare’s loose end—the Russian ultra-nationalists who funded a Middle Eastern coup, not that you could parse that from the disjointed recap—it crafts a story about America under siege shown from two perspectives: a U.S. army division and a black ops team courtesy of the British SAS. While the game starts in a cleanup mission in Afghanistan that feels somewhat strange today, it soon shifts to a military thriller as you defend the home turf, chase leads across Rio and Russia, and try to stay ahead of constant sensory overstimulation. And upon discovering that this was all concocted by the American general who’s been bossing you around for every level, you raid his base and knife him in the eye with possibly the single worst quick time event I have ever experienced. Then you get a non-ending cliffhanger and a bizarre end credits set in a museum honoring the game you just played. It’s a bit self-important.
Image: Source Gaming. The end credits, in which the characters are actors role playing the levels. It’s a freakish funhouse mirror of Mario and friends being actors in a stage play.
In terms of game feel, Modern Warfare is great. The grenades lack the oomph I found in 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand, but the guns are a lot more responsive here than in Borderlands and pointing them at enemies makes blood pop out nice and good. Impeccable graphics and audio, too. The suburbs of Virginia are impressively accurate, and some of the Russian levels are full of detail that make them feel lived in. I’d say it’s strongest when leaning on these and letting you explore houses, tunnels, snowy trails, and realistic sandboxes. It’s weakest when funneling you through one path. Unfortunately, that’s almost all of the game. Call of Duty has always been cinematic, a facet of its war movie inspirations (it was made to usurp Medal of Honor, which Steven Spieberg produced partially to recapture the atmosphere of Saving Private Ryan). But this one moves to strictly controlled set pieces, Michael Bay aesthetics, asinine and largely random twists, and, most of all, water cooler moments clearly designed to court controversy.
Image: Source Gaming. The two sides of Call of Duty: shooting has been perfected and carries a mild rush, but it’s in service to incredibly linear design. Your whole time is spent down iron sights or a scope being directed.
The most famous sequence of Modern Warfare 1 portrayed an American soldier slowly, horrifically dying in the wake of a nuclear blast. Depending on who you were, this was either a powerful condemnation of the horrors of war or a cynical, calculated justification for American intervention. But as the sequel to the game that dethroned Halo it was Modern Warfare 2’s job to up the stakes. Mostly this entailed making constant “shocking” moments; maybe an EMP blast that kills an astronaut and sends D.C. off the grid, or a scene where your SAS hero is shot and set on fire by Lance Henricksen’s General Shepherd. But none stood out like “No Russian,” a beyond tasteless mission in which you, as an American spy embedded in a militant cell, help shoot up a Russian airport. This was extremely controversial. The best-selling game of the year literally allowed players to gun down civilians. It’s also something of a feint. Since the terrorists know you’re undercover and always shoot you at the end of the mission, there’s no reason for it beyond shock value, but that shock value is diminished by a bad shootout section and how you’re not actually pushed to participate in the “fantasy.” In a game that makes you follow every order to the letter, suddenly the most provocative level by far lets you hang back and ogle the carnage. It is both exploitative and cowardly, like Infinity Ward and publisher Activision want to be edgy and serious and real but also don’t want to deep-six any of the tie-in product deals that would define Call of Duty’s public image. “Doritos and Dew” and the like. The game even allows you to skip it, which may be noble, I guess, but it ignores how bloody everything else is. The series has spent fifteen years chasing this high with moments obviously meant to cause uproar and offense, but it’s never surpassed “No Russian.”
Image: Source Gaming. The ugly “No Russian,” not featuring the giant pile of bodies you can shoot.
Okay, maybe it wasn’t exclusively for shock value. The attack was orchestrated by both Shepherd and Vladimir Makarov, a Russian supervillain gunning for… actually, it’s not clear, but by leaving a dead American as the only terrorist on the scene, he kicks off a Russian advance on U.S. soil as reprisal. This is telling because one of the things that made Modern Warfare 1 bold was its willingness to do something the entertainment industry is always reluctant to do: not depict America as a scrappy underdog. CoD4 had the confidence to be upfront about the fact that we’ve held the advantage in almost every conflict in our history, especially in Afghanistan and Iraq. Your characters dominated al-Asad’s soldiers, and the game’s propaganda and its antiwar pretensions both come from that imbalance. To indulge in a retro Cold War fantasy, Modern Warfare 2 steps back. Half the game is set in America, a front for the first time in about 200 years, where your Private Ramirez fights off an incursion into DC. You sneak through the backyards of a Virginia suburb to evade a BTU. You use a Burger King pastiche as a stronghold. You shoot up the WWII Memorial to kill a Russian encampment and hold up in a burning White House. The plaintive score emphasizes the horror. Except for the parts where you kill dozens of troops with a Predator drone, a monstrous device that has killed scores of civilians in real life but might be most famous as a power-up in this series’ insanely popular multiplayer, it’s classic Call of Duty. You’re a small man in a large, confusing battlefield.
Image: Source Gaming. Modern Warfare delights in destroying whole swaths of DC. It might seem weird for such a militaristic city, but Americans love being the little guy and seeing their monuments be destroyed. But that’s a topic for a different article.
The other half is a gonzo secret agent romp in which you help out CoD icon and “advanced interrogator” Soap MacTavish. Modern Warfare 1 and 2 marked a shift in Call of Duty in which protagonists moved from largely anonymous joes into the “operators,” the few and proud who matter. The black ops guys who get non-regulation haircuts and Punisher-esque skull insignias. Instead of honoring them for the sacrifice of walking into the inferno, we honor them for the “sacrifice” of committing and living with atrocities. It makes sense for games, letting you play the special people (it’s probably also good for the Pentagon, who can sell the Army as individualistic), and Infinity Ward relished this change. Your other character Roach shoots up a Brazilian favela and drives a snowmobile off a cliff and fights through a gulag to rescue Captain Price, the franchise mascot and symbol of making the hard choices. And Shepherd allows the game to have its cake and eat it, since he also rants about making the hard choices and betrays America in the hopes of igniting a murderous nationalism. See, we can’t be jingoistic; the twist ending bad guy is a jingoistic American! You can see with Ramirez and Roach the struggle of a game trying to give players grit, realism, the vicarious thrill of being the little guy, and James Bond-style excitement. Shockingly, the bag holding this together rips open almost immediately.
Image: Source Gaming. Blowing up enemies on an oil right with bombs stuck on their fallen comrades. Given that the game just had you rescue hostages, doing something so vile would seem unnatural. But it just kinda happens.
If it weren’t apparent by how the SAS levels notably outnumber the Army levels, the struggle ends definitively on the side of the unbridled power fantasy. Call of Duty started as a series about the overwhelming terror of war. You were only a soldier, and while you had to contribute to the unit you were insignificant. Modern Warfare 1, for all that it moved from that, still made time to examine the trope. Putting so much focus on the black ops guys helped Modern Warfare 2 plot a very blunt change in the franchise to prioritize thrills and cheap spectacle. Its campaigns began adding stuff that probably should’ve been relegated to the multiplayer—dual-wielding Desert Eagles in this go around, later on custom decals and a dog sidekick. When you, Soap, and Price gun your way through dozens of American troops to get to Shepherd in the final level, the scary moral quandary of killing people who were just on your side doesn’t register.
Image: Source Gaming. I may be a bleeding heart pacifist, but even I know that dual wielding guns is terrible for precision aiming. But it’s fun in campy FPS games, and it makes you feel like a man, so it’s here.
Of course, most players ignored all this. While the campaigns are super expensive and make up a lot of the marketing cycles, multiplayer has always been the selling point of Call of Duty. It’s not something I can review; I don’t have access to Xbox online play and though older entries are still supported, the player base enjoying Modern Warfare 2 in 2024 isn’t representative of the player base in 2009. Suffice it to say that although the campaigns are important and entirely valid as a subject of review, they largely exist as a preamble to the real experience. That isn’t an excuse for making stories that fetishize war, terrorism, or the military-industrial complex. In fact, it makes the propagandist elements even sleazier. Guns and weapons aren’t just tools of American military dominance but apolitical toys, disconnected from how they exist in real life by design. And racist abuse from players has been an endemic problem with the series for as long as I’ve been aware of it. But this piece cannot incorporate that. I’m unsure how to define the politics of a killstreak or gold-plated AK-47s.
Image: Source Gaming. Actually, maybe I could. The Predator drone strikes are a big part of the multiplayer. They’re a reward for a killstreak, and the campaign teaches you how to use them. This incentivizes getting and using a real life machine of death. It even goes out of its way to replicate the use. This is a sales pitch.
Politics are only some of this thing’s problems, though. Modern Warfare is painfully linear and scripted, regularly past the point of parody. Whether in the standout and rather sumptuous Burger Town sandbox, a dingy tunnel, or one of those restricted sequences, you’re expected to play the level in one way and are punished the moment you stray from the path. In the second mission, I died within two seconds because I moved slightly too far off what I did not realize was a Kazakhstani cliff. Rio is a string of corridors and doesn’t feel at all like a coherent space. Moments where you have to do some vaguely cinematic thing like running through a battlefield or controlling a turret are peppered throughout every level, always with an instant death for missing your mark. And since Americans don’t kill civilians (Shepherd’s words), the game loves to stick a bunch of innocent people in front of your iron sights as instant Game Overs. This is all presumably done for the sake of realism, showing your vulnerability to enemy fire or highlighting your role as an apex predator, but it doesn’t fit the power fantasy and at times feels more like a holdover from the old way of doing things in CoD. Much of the six hour experience is spent watching the “kill cam” of the latest enemy who whacked you before a quote from Voltaire, the Hebrew Talmud, Mark Twain, Confucius, or Dick Cheney gets plastered on the screen. ‘Cause that’s who I associate with patriotism and honor: Dick Cheney.
Image: Source Gaming. While there are plenty of people who shouldn’t be quoted in this game for one reason or another—Zora Neale Hurston, George Bernard Shaw, Donald Rumsfeld—perhaps the worst choice is James Baldwin. Using him to prop up your jingoistic war game is some kinda sin, and he’d hate being used like this.
The characters are also… nothing, particularly the protagonists. Your Bald Whitem’n soldier friends never rise above the thickest of clichés (damn near every line of dialogue reads like it was written for the trailer), though they at least get to speak. For whatever reason, maybe to be “immersive” or to sell the fantasy of being a cog in a machine, your characters don’t talk at all. When Soap becomes your avatar after Roach is, again, shot in the face and burned alive, he stops talking during levels. And I find this strange. The SAS guys are super soldiers with attack helicopters and night vision goggles, but even your humble Private gets to be the one to fire the Predators and Stinger missiles. So you are the hero, the center of the world, just also an utter nonentity. Oddly, this makes the game a bit like Balan Wonderworld, a story about being the assistant to the actual hero. Though perhaps this discordance isn’t detrimental but fundamental. Overwhelm defines Call of Duty, from bombastic set pieces to sensory overload, and in Modern Warfare 2, narrative incoherence adds to that overwhelm as much as the barks and bombs. This confusion helped the series turn into what Polygon’s Patrick Gill calls a “circus,” a proud farce of war crimes, product placement, granular military detail, and unadulterated excess.
Image: Source Gaming. Few things in Modern Warfare 2 are as singularly absurd as the snowmobile chase, where you drive off a cliff and land on another cliff. It’s fully a James Bond set piece, and any pretensions to realism just die the second it starts.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 was the first in the series to be the best-selling game of its year, but far from the last. With three exceptions—Grand Theft Auto V in 2013, Red Dead Redemption 2 in 2018, and Hogwarts Legacy in 2023—every new entry has hit that mark. Last year’s Modern Warfare 3 sort of reboot was the worst-reviewed game in the franchise, and the most it suffered was being outsold by a Harry Potter RPG. Each features something offensive or problematic or which outright glamorizes not only American war but the industries that drive it. Many, particularly the Black Ops period pieces, play up rightwing paranoia. After this entry, they also went harder on the individualist killing machines, relegating the humble joes who stormed Normandy in the original games to token roles. Despite their controversies, the series is rife with tie-in products from the likes of Mountain Dew and Little Caesars. And ignoring any moral issues, or the gross and well-documented relationship they have with the U.S. military, these games have been on a largely downward slide for years. They’re shorter, restrictive, broken, and done in a crunch because that’s what happens when a Triple-A series is annualized.
Image: Source Gaming. The Rio battle epitomizes a lot of the Call of Duty experience. You’re shooting up street after street, but it’s okay since the only people you meet are hundreds of frenzied gangsters. And you’re also frogmarched through each set piece and punished instantly for straying off the past. It’s almost perfectly fascist in its elegance.
Right, the annual releases. Even before Modern Warfare 2, it didn’t take long for Activision to see Call of Duty as its main attraction and start throwing bodies at Infinity Ward, Treyarch (the Black Ops sub-series) and later Sledgehammer (the broken Call of Duty: Vanguard). At present fifteen studios and thousands of people work on this series, with stories of labor mistreatment aplenty. Acclaimed teams are bought and forced into support roles to keep the monster going because every entry takes up to four years and, improbably, over $300 million to make. Not unlike modern Pokémon but on a more ambitious scale, this sheer drive has led to products that are glitchy, barren, and bloated in file size. None of this has diminished sales; neither has the negative PR of sending beloved studios into the “Call of Duty mines.” The series’ last risk was when Microsoft bought Activision last year, since Xbox requires all its games to be on Game Pass and, by extension, free to tens of millions of users. Call of Duty was at the center of the acquisition, with the FTC prioritizing it during its failed antitrust suit and forcing a decade-long contract that the series be multiplatform. Last month’s Black Ops 6 has been a massive success, which feels depressing. Microsoft shouldn’t be rewarded for decades of poor business practices. A hyper-monetized tribute to the American war machine shouldn’t be the crux of an industry leader. And Microsoft has proudly stated that they have no interest in fixing what apparently isn’t broken. That’s really where I’ve always been with CoD, resentment over how it’s rewarded for bad behavior. No matter what it does, it always wins, and gamers can’t even do the bare minimum and vote for…
…Freudian slip, I’m sorry. Despite my misgivings, it’s not like the series is nearly as ubiquitous as it used to be. Back in the days of Modern Warfare 2, it was the omnipresent face of a stupid, miserable gaming culture. It was everywhere and seemed to influence the entire industry. But we’ve left the days of Gun Metal Gaming, and now it’s one more flavor, and an archaic one at that. Yearly releases are very bad for everyone, but it’s a different kind of consumer gouging than the current standard of live services (each CoD is a consumer gouging live service, to be clear, they’re just meant to last only a year. Yes, that’s nuts). Fortnite, Apex Legends, Destiny, and Overwatch all dug new streams in the river of shooters. At times CoD itself apes them with gimmick modes and dumb crossovers, probably because it no longer has anything but its fetish for authenticity. This also explains a struggle for direction that has led to it to tackle cyborgs, ‘Nam, a gender-inclusive Ronald Reagan, space warfare, a zombie mode featuring Richard Nixon and Sarah Michelle Gellar, and a castigated reboot of the Modern Warfare Trilogy. I suppose we should treat Call of Duty as something of an obscenely expensive Madden, an annual series that makes bank but no longer “matters.” It’s probably impossible for the franchise to fix itself—if anything, I suspect Activision’s business practices are already infecting Microsoft’s entire gaming division—so perhaps it’s simply damned to be a lumbering relic.
Image: Source Gaming. Not to get too political (after, you know, every other paragraph here), but it’s also just kinda gross playing this, especially now. The game is obsessed with the idea of America as victim, but it’s also more attached than ever to the “operator” fantasy, so it can only see its enemies as this amorphous collective of resentment and conspiracy.
That’s an unsatisfying ending, I’ll admit. This game was simply a step in the wrong direction for a series now desperately in need of a right one. Little to glean that wasn’t there in 2009. But in the interest of positivity, we do have a new greatest year in gaming to rival the last one, and it only took ten years to find it. Several of 2017’s greatest games do have caveats, but fewer caveats and even more great games. Even its chart-topping Call of Duty, a throwback to the series’ World War II roots, had that “Liberation” mission. Best of all, over the course of the decade between the years, we developed better ways of understanding and discussing this wonderful medium. We’re smarter. I am too, even if my lifestyle has led me to now own two copies of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. Much less cool than when I owned two copies of Predator 2 for over a decade before I actually saw Predator 2.
Now, onto the last game, and the last Activision game, of “Gun Metal Gaming.”
Next game: Prototype.
Read all of “Gun Metal Gaming” here.
- Gun Metal Gaming Chapter 11: The Best-Selling Game of 2009 - November 28, 2024
- Holism: The Items in Mario Kart’s Wacky Races - November 25, 2024
- Holism: Breaking Balatro - November 15, 2024
