The End is Nigh: Call of Duty

By Martin Gaston

‘The End is Nigh’ is a weekly column by Play.tm’s Martin Gaston, pondering the nature of videogame endings and why we do or don’t choose to finish the games we play. This week: giving up on the original Call of Duty.

When World War I started, it was believed to be sweet and right to die for one’s country.

Almost a century later, we just experience the sentiment through the glossy veneer of Hollywood and action games. I realised this week that, for the best part of three months, I have been dodging a crucial part of this column’s remit: the games I don’t complete. Look, it’s mentioned right up there in the blurb text so graciously provided by our benevolent editor. With Remembrance Sunday just gone, and Modern Warfare 2 out tomorrow, I figured I’d kill two birds with one stone and admit the following: I’ve never completed the original Call of Duty.

It felt to me back then as if it was almost too realistic. After a couple of hours my train of thought progressed from the vacant joy of blasting away targets in a game with excellent graphics and sound, through to the endless cycle of acquisition that defines modern human life – thinking maybe I should fork out for a new graphics card and wishing for a bigger telly that could go in a house that looked like the ones people have in glitzy American dramas – and finished on the realisation that, hang on, people my age were actually over there doing all this two generations ago, and they were probably wishing for a world where they didn’t have to die in a grubby ditch.

That meant it was all a bit too much to take in back then, so I retreated back to the safety of Counter-Strike, a game where nobody ever got hurt and the worst thing that could ever happen was, after killing them for the sixth time, somebody might tell you to go and choke on a phallus.

It’s worth remembering that the pedigree shooters at the time were titles like Quake and Half-Life, which were in turn based on the likes of Wolfenstein and Doom. Things go boom, forces of good triumph and nondescript evil entities collapse with their intestines dribbling over the floor – in our minds, of course, as technology hadn’t quite reached God of War III levels at this point. It was all good, harmless fun back then, and we chortled whilst bludgeoning someone to death and celebrated in gladiatorial delight after killing ten people in a row. M-m-m-monster kill! These things had never been real until Call of Duty (and, to an extent, Medal of Honor before it) decided to show up and make it so.

Shooting games weren’t based on actual events, and even if they were the presentation was so gratuitous, low-tech and hyperbolic it didn’t feel like they were. The original Call of Duty could have ended with your driving a 40-foot robot ostrich, with nuclear missile launchers for wings, into the base of a zombiefied Hitler for all I know – but judging from the first half of the game it didn’t seem likely. It was all rather grim. Like it was trying to present a war, or something.

Going back to it this week, it now strikes me as somewhat heavy-handed. It all feels a bit too much like reality through the lens of Hollywood, taking genuine events and skewing them to be more eventfully explosive. Five games later and that’s still what the series does best. But I’m still impressed with how the technical aspects of the game hold up: being forced to use ironsights; the way your vision blurs when caught in a blast; the convincing ‘I’m sure that’s how they actually sounded even though I have no idea’ weapon sounds; and the distressing ambience of being plunged, with a squad of understandably miserable looking AI companions, gun-first into videogaming’s most popular war. It was all encased within an excellent selection of meticulously crafted levels, too. It’s a very good game. But I’ll never finish it.

Although I can certainly see why it’s influenced the modern shooter to the extent that it has, as well as making Activision and Infinity Ward piles upon piles of money in the process, it strikes me as being violent to the point of being a bit comical, and then it goes a bit schizophrenic with crude shoehorning of an obligatory anti-war sentiment every couple of minutes. That’s what really gets to me: it revels in conflict far too much to be anti-war. It’s trying to be an action movie, which is fine, but it’s asking us to answer our calls of duty under false liberal pretences. And there’s something about that which I find very off-putting.

Ultimately, I’m still yet to finish the game because it feels like the modern equivalent of the ever-famous old lie: Dulce et Decorum est pro patria mori.