The year is 2011, and civil war has broken out in Russia between the Russian government and Russian ultranationalists under the command of Imran Zakhaev who seek to restore Russia back to its former Soviet-style leadership. A revolution has toppled a regime in an unnamed Arabic country which has ties to the Russian ultranationalists, with Khaled al-Asad coming to power. These two simultaneous events are causing fear that al-Asad and Zakhaev might form an alliance and use nuclear weapons against the West. In response to these concerns, the United States and the United Kingdom conduct joint operations to put down both uprisings, without putting their own nations' security at risk. Will they succeed?
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Before they landed on the name we all know, Infinity Ward reportedly went through well over a thousand potential titles for the game. Some of the rejected ones were properly daft too, including the frankly brilliant Call of Duty: Warnado.
One of the most beloved multiplayer maps in the whole franchise only exists because somebody forgot to delete it. Multiplayer design director Geoff Smith has said Shipment started life as an internal test map built for old-school split-screen play, and it got accidentally left in the launch playlist. Nobody ever pulled it back out.
Take a wander round the outside area on the multiplayer map Vacant and you'll spot a parked truck. Zoom in on its number plate and it reads 'Я3T4ЯD0', which if you squint is just a backwards spelling of a certain playground insult.
The loading screen for the bonus mission Mile High Club quietly nods to the 1980 comedy Airplane!. Listen closely as it loads and you'll hear one voice ask 'Surely you can't be serious?', followed by the classic reply, 'I am serious, and don't call me Shirley.'
The German release trimmed the blood out of the sniper mission One Shot, One Kill and dropped the arcade mode entirely. Even the on-screen word for headshot got swapped, changed from the English term to 'Volltreffer', which just means direct hit.
That gut-punch of a scene where Sergeant Paul Jackson crawls out of a downed helicopter into a mushroom cloud wasn't just there for shock value. Critics have pointed out it deliberately strips away every bit of control the campaign spent hours building up, right before killing the character off outright, which is almost unheard of for a genre built on power fantasies.
Sergeant 'Soap' MacTavish is one of the series' most recognisable faces now, but in his very first appearance he was a silent protagonist. He didn't get an actual voice actor until Modern Warfare 2 came along.
During the flashback mission, Captain Price mentions the events are happening a decade after the Chernobyl disaster. Do the maths on that and it quietly places the whole flashback in 1996, years before the rest of the campaign takes place.
Long before he was barking orders in the SAS, Billy Murray, the voice behind Captain Price in the original trilogy, spent years playing Don Beech on The Bill and later Johnny Allen on EastEnders. He stuck with the role of Price all the way through the first three games.
When the series rebooted in 2019, Barry Sloane took over as Price instead of Billy Murray. Part of the reasoning reportedly came down to Murray being 77 at the time, which made the heavy motion capture work the newer games demand a much tougher ask.
