Trivia / Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2

• Banned in China: The game was banned in Russia for a while, though the game is now available (apparently with some cut content), including from Russia's biggest online retailer, Ozon.ru. The 2020 remaster is not available for the Russian PSN store due to a decision by Sony.
• Life Imitates Art: The heartbeat sensors used by by the game's special forces were derided as an absurd and unrealistic sci-fi contrivance at the time of the game's release, but only a few years later NASA in conjunction with the Department of Homeland security would come up with just such an invention, albeit targeted at rescue operations rather than combat. The cherry on top? The project's lead is named John Price.
• Meaningful Release Date: November 10th, 2009 for Modern Warfare 2, which was advertised in the trailers as "11-10-09", with the numbers blinking on in sequence like the countdown before an explosion.
• Orphaned Reference:
  • The final boss fight against General Shepherd on a version of "Rust" was cut from the game in favor of a simple Cutscene Boss, but observant viewers can notice that "Rust" is still visible in the background of the ending.
  • If you go over to the diorama representing "No Russian" in the Museum and activate it you'll see Makarov grab Kiril by the throat and say something to him. This refers to an animation that plays out before the start of the mission when everyone is standing together in the elevator, but in-game this scene is blacked out until everyone is simply standing normally with the elevator doors about to open, so it never actually happens in front of the player.
• Pre-Order Bonus: The game has two special versions, the Hardened Edition and Prestige. Hardened contains an art book, steel case and other bonus content, while the Prestige edition contains an IW-branded EyeClops Night Vision toy. Note that the word "toy" is not a baseless insult - the manufacturer really does advertise it as being for children. To be fair, real night vision goggles would simply cost too much to include with the game. That being said they do work as advertised: they're effective up to 30 feet or so.
• Urban Legend of Zelda: "Sniper Frog" is a running meme within the MW2 community, after an unsourced GameFAQs post claimed that spfg.exe was a program running in the background which essentially doled out luck to players who weren't doing well and handicapped those who were.
• What Could Have Been:
  • The game originally had a level set on the International Space Station as it was invaded, but it was cut as it was felt to be too unrealistic and the assets ended up being recycled for the EMP cutscene.^note The idea of combat on a space station would later be realized in the prologue to Call of Duty: Ghosts. A level set in Los Angeles and another simply called "Roadkill" were also planned, but cut; the LA level was supposedly supposed to have the player riding a motorcycle, similar to the snowmobile from "Cliffhanger", which means that some of the code was probably salvaged for a similar sequence early in the following Call of Duty: Black Ops.
  • Special Ops was born after the developers wanted to have regular campaign co-op like World at War had, but they found themselves unable to make the singleplayer levels both compatible with more than one player character and fun to play in the form they were supposed to appear, to say nothing of the problems scripted sequences would have presented (which is the reason why World at War has far fewer of those than CoD4 and MW2 did). Special Ops as such mostly does with taking the existing maps for singleplayer and remixing them for more challenge with less story that a second player can circumvent.
  • The game files suggest that Raptor, the VIP you rescue in "Wolverines!", was supposed to be the President of the United States earlier in development. It is still heavily implied that he's a high-ranking government official, but his actual identity is left ambiguous.
  • The game also had several cut weapons. Most of them were just ones from Call of Duty 4 that didn't make the cut but had their files left in the game (the G36 [minus its sights, for some reason], R700, M40A3, and M60 from CoD4 can all be used in some singleplayer levels through hacking, and there are textures left over for others like the G3 [the full model for which was used as a placeholder in some early pre-release footage], AK-74u, STG-44 and M14), though one weapon in particular was an entirely new addition, the L85 assault rifle - which ended up reworked into the L86 support weapon (indicated by the fact that its pickup icon is still an L85, and its maximum ammo is divisible by 30 rather than 100). Another new weapon that was simply cut rather than being reworked was the Remington 870 shotgun, which wouldn't appear in a main Call of Duty game until Black Ops II.
  • Several cut perks also had weird and unique effects, a few of which were made inherent abilities of some other piece of equipment or worked into later games:
    • "Rearview" replaced your minimap with a rear-view camera.
    • "Dive" would let you dodge bullets by jumping.
    • "Challenger" would reduce your health in return for an experience multiplier.
    • "Freerunner" would have let you mantle objects faster, which eventually became the Pro effect of Marathon.
    • "Primary Stand" would have let the player use either weapon as an improved version of Last Stand, which instead became the deathstreak Final Stand.
    • "Amplify" made enemy footstep sounds louder, which was worked into the Pro version of SitRep.
    • "Spy Game" would have removed the red name or crosshair when an enemy player was close-by or targeting you, which eventually made it into MW3 as Assassin.
    • "Freefall", would have removed falling damage except for Bottomless Pits or other clearly-inescapable areas. It was worked into the effects of Lightweight in the Black Ops games.
    • "Mozambique" let you fire all guns in three-round bursts, which was made the ability of the Select Fire attachment in Black Ops II.
    • "Shellshock" would put a riot shield on the player's back to protect them from shots to the rear; in the released game, this is an inherent ability of the riot shield when it's put away.
    • "Thermal Vision" made enemies appear white-hot, which was presumably replaced by the thermal scope.
    • "Dead Man's Hand", a death streak that let players crawl around with a C4 pack to detonate on unsuspecting foes if they died too many times without making a kill, which only made it into MW3.
  • The game had its own selection of cut maps as well, though not as many as the previous game. The cut maps include "Vertigo" (set on top of a building, likely cut for being too similar to Highrise), "Riverwalk" (about which nothing is known other than its name), "Gulag" (a multiplayer conversion of "The Gulag" from singleplayer), and "Oil Rig" (a multiplayer conversion of "The Only Easy Day... was Yesterday"). One, however, "Fuel", ended up being released later on as part of the Resurgence Pack.
  • The final battle against General Shepherd, which is a Cutscene Boss in the finished game, was originally a legitimate boss fight, where you engaged in a 1 vs. 1 gunfight against him in the Rust area, while he ranted and explained that he and/or the US government had been manipulating the Ultranationalists in the previous game. Going by the subtitles and developer text, it would have also had you playing as Price, rather than retaining control of Soap, though it evidently still would have ended with Shepherd stabbing your character in the chest.