How Call of Duty Reinvented The First-Person Shooter

ign.com:

Very few video games have truly changed the way we play. The likes of Half-Life, World of Warcraft, and Fortnite are once-in-a-generation shifts. October 2023 marks the 20th anniversary of one of those seismic games: the original Call of Duty. What began as an attempt to beat Medal of Honor at its own game turned into a monolithic franchise with over 400 million sales across 30 different games. It was a significant turning point for both FPS campaign design and online multiplayer, ushering in an era of cinematic set pieces and ladder-based progression. Call of Duty was, undoubtedly, the FPS that changed shooters forever.

The tale of Call of Duty can, technically speaking, be traced back to the Second World War, the conflict out of which the series formed its bedrock. But it was not the war itself that birthed Call of Duty so much as the movies that emerged from it. And so the true starting point for its story is not a mission but a man: a director called Steven Spielberg.

During his days making the war epic Saving Private Ryan, Spielberg would often watch his son play GoldenEye 007. This sparked an idea for a video game that could be both educational and entertaining. The result was Medal of Honor, released in 1999 for the original PlayStation. But both it and its sequel, Medal of Honor: Underground, focused on small-scale infiltration missions. For the third game in the series, publisher Electronic Arts had ambitions of something much grander: D-Day.

It was clear that if Medal of Honor was going to achieve the scale and intensity of Spielberg’s beach landings, the next game needed greater horsepower. And so Electronic Arts contracted Oklahoma-based studio 2015, Inc. to create the PC-exclusive Medal of Honor: Allied