Trivia / Call of Duty

• Beam Me Up, Scotty!: Call of Duty games often use the quote "only the dead have seen the end of war," attributing it to Plato. The earliest known use of the phrase is actually attributed to George Santayana in 1922.
• Cash-Cow Franchise: Since Modern Warfare 2, each new entry in the series (up until and including Black Ops II, anyway) has become one of or simply the biggest-selling game of the year. In 2018, Activision verified the series' sales to be over 300 million units sold, putting it behind only Super Mario Bros. and Pokémon, and that was before the release of several other games (there's also the fact that Mario and Pokémon both had large head-starts and their sales are inflated by handhelds, which cost a lot less; not to mention there are 200+ Mario games compared to < 20 CoD games).
  • The 2019 Mobile Phone Game release marks the return of record-breaking numbers Call of Duty has been raking since 2012. Specifically, it accumulated over 100 million downloads in two weeks, making it the biggest mobile game launch ever.
• Channel Hop:
  • A mild example in 2015, where Square Enix stopped publishing and localizing the series to Japanese, with Microsoft and Sony taking over the job for the Japanese publishing to their respective consoles. The PC (and eventually, mobile) games of the series are still published by Activision themselves in Japan.
  • Microsoft announced their intention to acquire Activision Blizzard in January 2022, which was reportedly mere weeks after the latter had signed an agreement with Sony for PlayStation to receive preferential treatment when it comes to Call of Duty updates and marketing for at least the next three entries. The current understanding is that this agreement will be honored, but what happens after that is unknown.
• Cowboy BeBop at His Computer:
  • Many critics claim that the Modern Warfare games glorify war and xenophobia. It's kind of hard to state that when the first game alone shows the horrible consequences of gung-ho military adventurism while having you teamed up with Russian Loyalists the entire time. It also seems to have even skipped a lot of player's attention that the American forces are coming to "liberate" the unnamed Middle Eastern country, with ambiguous and contradictory evidence about whether it's a genuine sentiment or a transparent power play for control of the "oil rich" Arab nation. Y'know, just like real life.
  • Can apply to the whole series since every and each installment has at least one level that shows that War Is Hell. However, it's still thought of as "the FPS series that glorifies war" by people who, if they played it at all, paid zero attention to anything but the shooting.
• No Port For You:
  • A vast majority of CoD installments have been ported/released on the PC. However, three notable exceptions are 3, Finest Hour, and Big Red One. Mostly likely due to the fact that these are the only entries not running on the IW Engine.
  • Inversely, the original Call of Duty was exclusive to PC until the release of Call of Duty Classic with the Hardened Edition of Modern Warfare 2, and its Expansion Pack United Offensive remains a PC exclusive two decades on.
• Technical Advisor: The franchise utilized many of these during the production of the games:
  • To help develop Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare's narrative, Sledgehammer Games worked with military advisors, futurologists, and a scenario planner from the US Department of Defense and asked them what they believed to be the biggest source of conflict for the future, to which the consensus was that in the form of a private military company gone rogue, forming the basis of the Atlas Corporation.
  • Sledgehammer Games consulted with World War II historian Marty Morgan for Call of Duty: WWII and Call of Duty: Vanguard, assisting them in their research and studying of material, including traveling to key points throughout Europe and traveling routes taken by soldiers in order to capture the essence of the war and make it as authentic as possible.
  • For Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (2019), Infinity Ward consulted with retired Navy SEALs Steve Sanders and Mitch Hall for both the levels and overall narrative, giving advice on how soldiers should move through spaces and react to a given scenario, as well as help create a story that would ring true to soldiers like them.
• Why Fandom Can't Have Nice Things: Tactical Insertions in online multiplayer. Originally debuting in Modern Warfare 2, they were intended to allow players to choose where they would respawn after their next death. However some of the community used Tac Inserts as a way to boost for easy XP, unlockable equipment and camos, and easy killstreaks. As a result, Tac Inserts were banished to the Infected game mode in both Ghosts and Advanced Warfare, though this has not discouraged boosting.