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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In the training mission F.N.G., if you retry the CQB test and start doing worse, Captain Price grumbles that maybe it was a mistake letting you skip the obstacle course. Funny thing is, there really was a much larger obstacle course planned for that mission before it got cut, so the line is basically a joke about content that never made it in.
Not every map made it to launch. A pair called Favela and Invasion were cut from Call of Duty 4's Variety Map Pack, but Infinity Ward clearly didn't want to waste the work, because both eventually resurfaced in Modern Warfare 2 instead.
Digging through old build files shows Infinity Ward experimented with night-time versions of several multiplayer maps, including Ambush, Strike, District and Overgrown. They were basically identical to the day versions bar the lighting, and none of them made the final cut.
Before 2007, 'generic shooter setting' basically meant World War II. Call of Duty 4 flipped that overnight, and the shift was so complete that even other long-running WWII franchises started scrambling to set their games in the modern day instead.
The perk system, killstreaks, and customisable loadouts that feel completely standard in shooters today all trace back to this game. It's been copied so thoroughly by other studios that it's now considered unusual for a modern shooter not to have some version of it.
Craig Fairbrass pulled double duty on this one, voicing both Gaz and a character called Wallcroft, before going on to become a very different fan favourite as Ghost in Modern Warfare 2.
The game never made it onto shelves in Saudi Arabia or the United Arab Emirates, where it was banned over its depiction of violence against Islamic soldiers.
That soldier staring out from the cover isn't a stock model or an actor. It's actually Mark Rubin, who worked at Infinity Ward at the time.
PlayStation 3 owners picking this up at launch wouldn't have found a single trophy to earn. Sony's trophy system simply hadn't been built into the platform yet when the game shipped.
Long-time players will remember the riverside house on Overgrown, the one with a climbable roof and a machine gun tucked in the attic, affectionately nicknamed 'grandma's house' by the community for reasons nobody can quite agree on. That same house was quietly rebuilt inside Verdansk when Warzone launched.
