When he's interrogated by unknown figures, Alex Mason has to remember the location of a broadcast station, to stop a horrifying biotic weapon attack. During the progress, he begins to suspect the true identity of his Soviet friend-Victor Reznov.
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The Call of the Dead zombies map didn't bother inventing new characters for its cast. Danny Trejo, Robert Englund, Sarah Michelle Gellar, and Michael Rooker all show up playing themselves, complete with motion capture, turning the map into a strange little horror convention where the guest stars are also the ones fighting off the undead.
As if stacking a zombies map with horror actors wasn't enough, Treyarch also brought in George Romero, the filmmaker who more or less invented the modern zombie movie, to play Call of the Dead's undead antagonist. It's a fittingly on-the-nose casting choice for a map that's already dripping with genre homage.
During the campaign mission U.S.D.D., President Kennedy personally briefs Mason at the Pentagon and greenlights the mission to take down Dragovich. The story then jumps forward less than two weeks to Kennedy's trip to Dallas, and the final cutscene quietly places Mason himself in the crowd that day, leaving it deliberately unclear whether his brainwashing ever really got switched off.
Kennedy isn't just a campaign cameo. He's one of the four playable characters in the zombies map Five, using a different, more exaggerated voice actor than his campaign appearance. On the map Ascension, there's also a ringing telephone you can pick up to hear him shout a line about needing 'some beans for the chowder,' a strange little callback that has nothing to do with the plot but has stuck with fans for years anyway.
On its first day alone, Black Ops moved roughly 5.6 million copies across North America and the UK, pulling in about $360 million and beating the previous record set a year earlier by Modern Warfare 2. Activision called it the biggest entertainment launch in history at the time, and for a while nothing else in games, film, or publishing had come close.
By late December 2010, barely six weeks after launch, Activision announced Black Ops had crossed a billion dollars in worldwide sales. Players had also logged more than 600 million hours in the game by that point, with the average person reportedly playing for over an hour every time they sat down with it.
Nuketown is dotted with mannequins standing around in the yards, and if you and your team manage to headshot every single one within about fifteen seconds, the map rewards you by blasting 'Sympathy for the Devil' over the loudspeakers. It's genuinely tough to pull off solo since the mannequins are spread across both sides of the map, so it usually takes a coordinated effort from the whole lobby.
Most three-kill streaks in Black Ops just give you information, like a Spy Plane. The RC-XD breaks that pattern completely, handing you a remote-controlled car packed with explosives that you drive straight into enemies before blowing it up. It's the only reward at that low a killstreak tier that lets you rack up an actual kill with your own hands rather than just intel.
Wager Match was one of the odder additions to the original Black Ops multiplayer, letting six players throw their CoD Points into a pot before a match and split the winnings based on where they finished. First place walked away with half the pool, second got thirty percent, and third took the rest, while anyone outside the top three lost their buy-in entirely.
The Skylines map isn't just a static backdrop. Players can interact with the building's security systems to lock or unlock doors, uncover hidden rooms, and even drive an RC-XD through secret corridors that lead straight toward the other team's spawn point, turning a simple killstreak toy into a sneaky infiltration tool.
