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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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.
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.
