Set in 2025, US Navy Seal Commander David 'Section' Mason, the son of former CIA Operative Alex Mason, fights to take out Raul Menendez , a Nicaraguan narco-terrorist and his organization, Cordis Die, after Menendez manages to gain control of the entire Unmanned US Drone Fleet in order to launch attacks on cities across the world. Meanwhile, Sergeant Frank Woods, now retired, recalls his experiences in the 1980s with Alex Mason on why Menendez became a terrorist.
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That faded 'Welcome to Nuketown' billboard isn't just set dressing. The population number on it genuinely changes to match how many players are currently in your match. It's such a tiny detail most people never look up long enough to notice, but Treyarch carried the idea forward, giving it an actual gameplay job as a kill counter in the Black Ops II zombies version of the map.
Even though Reznov's role in Black Ops II is little more than a cameo, his dog tags are still obtainable as a collectible reward in the Kill Confirmed multiplayer mode. It's the kind of thing only die-hard fans of the character would ever bother chasing down, but it's a nice bit of continuity for a character who barely appears in the sequel's story.
When Jason Hudson returns for Black Ops II, he's no longer voiced by the same actor from the first game. Michael Keaton stepped into the role instead, giving Hudson a new voice years after Keaton had already played his own version of Batman in Tim Burton's films.
Former Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega and retired Marine lieutenant colonel Oliver North, of Iran-Contra fame, both appear in Black Ops II's campaign, with North voicing his own character. It's a strange bit of casting even by Call of Duty's usual standards, mixing real-world figures with controversial pasts directly into the fiction.
Black Ops II's epilogue features Jimmy Kimmel playing himself, hosting a fictional episode of his own talk show within the game's near-future setting. It doubles as some pretty shameless self-promotion on Kimmel's part, but it fits right in with the game's habit of blending real celebrities into its 2025 vision of the world.
Black Ops II cast retired general David Petraeus as the Secretary of Defense in its 2025 storyline, serving under a fictional female president aboard a carrier named the USS Barack Obama. The timing was almost unbelievably awkward, since the game launched the same week Petraeus resigned as CIA director over an extramarital affair in real life.
To make its 2025 setting feel plausible rather than pure sci-fi, Treyarch brought in writer and defense analyst P.W. Singer, who handed developers a list of emerging military technologies sorted by how close they actually were to real deployment. That's part of why so many of the game's drones and cyberwarfare elements ended up feeling less like fantasy and more like an early preview of where things were actually heading.
In the Black Ops II zombies version of Nuketown, if you walk up to the fallout shelter door in the yellow house's backyard and knife the door, you'll hear Marlton Johnson, a character from the TranZit storyline, muttering complaints from inside about the dust and radiation. He's not doing anything else on the map, he's just stuck in there, reusing lines from a completely different level.
Rather than reusing any of the established zombies crew, the Mob of the Dead map builds a completely self-contained story around four mobsters locked up on Alcatraz during Prohibition. They're in the middle of executing a daring escape plan the same night a zombie outbreak hits the island, turning their jailbreak into a fight for survival instead.
Treyarch didn't hold back on casting for Mob of the Dead, bringing in Michael Madsen, Joe Pantoliano, Chazz Palminteri, and Ray Liotta to voice and perform motion capture for the four convicts at the center of the map. It's the kind of lineup you'd expect from an actual gangster film rather than a zombies DLC pack.
