A Brief History
Since Call of Duty‘s debut on October 29, 2003, it has become one of the best-known and most-played video game series of all time. It has prompted divides between children who want to play it and parents who will not let them, and it is diverted the attention of players away from their spouses to such an extent that it has been cited in divorce papers, but how much do you really know about the all-conquering Call of Duty franchise?
We’re not talking about the best defensive positions to take on a map, or the fastest way to progress through single-player campaign modes. Every Call of Duty player worth their salt already knows that information, and even if you do not, it is all available online within days of the latest release anyway. We are talking about the fascinating pieces of trivia that have arisen out of the game, including its incredible sales success, and the way it re-invigorated a legendary British rock band. Here is a collection of Call of Duty facts that you probably did not know until today!
Digging Deeper
It Has Broken Every Sales Record Going
There are certain video game franchises that are guaranteed to be huge sellers. A new entry in the FIFA series of soccer video games, for example, is guaranteed to shift new numbers. A new Halo would be expected to do big numbers, too. Neither franchise could even dream of enjoying the kind of sales success that Call of Duty has seen over the years. When Call of Duty: Modern Warfare was released in October 2019, it took only nine days to become the biggest-selling game of 2019. The fact that it was able to eclipse the sales figures of every other game released this year in the space of little more than a week is mind-blowing. It still isn’t the game’s best-ever launch though – 2011’s Modern Warfare 3 is still the fastest-selling video game of all time, shifting almost nine million copies within its first month of release.
It Has Gone To The Casinos
There is a small overlap between successful TV, movie, and video gaming franchises and successful casino games. Call of Duty is one of the properties that has crossed over and found success as a mobile slots game. Not only is there an official ‘Call of Duty 4‘ mobile slots game, but there is also a slot ‘inspired by’ Call of Duty called Call of Fruity, and that has also proven to be popular with people looking to strike lucky. We have seen other video games crossover to the online slots, with Street Fighter and Tomb Raider also having their own official mobile slots, but Call of Duty is the only game from the current era that has proven its ability to attract players to online casinos.
You Could Fill A Large City With Players
Activision’s servers must be made of stern stuff. When Call of Duty games are at their busiest, there are millions of players all online at the same time, and yet the game usually manages to cope with the demand without lag or connection issues. At once point, over five million people were all recorded as being online at the same time playing Modern Warfare 2, and they came from all over the world. If they had all been in the same place to play it, that is enough people to completely fill a city the size of Chicago or Los Angeles. In fact, the only American city with a larger population than five million is New York. It is no wonder the online environment sometimes feels crowded – there is a whole city’s worth of people playing.
It Made The Rolling Stones Cool Again
We know we’re going to anger people by suggesting that the Rolling Stones stopped being cool, but it is hard to argue that they are not as big a deal now as they were during the 1960s and 1970s. They’re legends, but they do not sell as many albums or singles as they used to – except when they are featured in a Call of Duty game. The Stones teamed up with Activision for Call of Duty: Black Ops in 2010 and allowed “Gimme Shelter” to be used in commercials for the game. A whole generation of music fans heard the song for the first time and went online to buy it. For a brief period, there was a spike in the sales of the back catalog of the Rolling Stones. It seems as if players liked what they had heard, and went looking for more music by the band.
It Has Been Played For Longer Than The Human Race Has Existed
This fact is not about time travel. We are not about to suggest that an ancient lost civilization had access to Call of Duty and were playing it millions of years before the rest of us were born. This is still a hard fact to get your head around, though. If you count up all the combined hours that every Call of Duty player has spent playing every game in the series, the figure comes in at more than twenty-five billion hours of game time. If you break that down into years, it is just over 2,850,000. To give you a sense of perspective on that, the homo sapien species – that is, the modern human race – first appeared on the planet approximately 350,000 years ago. Imagine what the human race could have achieved if all of those hours had been collectively used for something more valuable than video games? Having said that, we are not sure we would have wanted to miss out on playing Call of Duty, so we would have to consider it time well spent!
Call of Duty is not just a video gaming franchise anymore. It is a massive entertainment property that has earned more money than the five largest-grossing movies of all time combined. It is not done yet either – there are at least two new Call of Duty games currently in development, and there is also talk that a movie will hit cinema screens at some point within the next two years. For all the crazy achievements that Call of Duty has racked up so far, it is only going to get bigger as the years go by. Parents might never fall in love with the idea of their children playing it, and it is always likely to cause resentment in neglected partners when a new game is released, but Call of Duty is here to stay.
Question for students (and subscribers) to ponder: Do you have a favorite Call of Duty game?
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Historical Evidence
For more information, please see…
Kinney, Bob. Call of Duty: WWII Game Guide: Includes Walkthroughs, Weapons, Tips and Tricks and much more! CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2018.
The featured image in this article, a photograph by dronepicr of Call of Duty Modern Warfare Gamescom 2019, is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license. This image was originally posted to Flickr by dronepicr at https://flickr.com/photos/132646954@N02/48605842367. It was reviewed on by FlickreviewR 2 and was confirmed to be licensed under the terms of the cc-by-2.0.