Masterpiece: Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare

Ars Technica is happy to debut a new series of articles celebrating games that are nearly perfect, or that mark a major turning point in the industry. We’ll be updating irregularly, and our choices are bound to get people talking. Our first pick? Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare.

If you have not played the single-player portions of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare or Modern Warfare 2, this post contains spoilers.

Leaving its mark

It’s been said that few people saw the Velvet Undergound play live, but everyone who did started their own band. In the same way, Call of Duty 4 left its mark on every war game developer since. The difference is that everyone played Call of Duty 4, and its stamp on gaming has been both obvious and wide.

The things we saw in Call of Duty 4 were shocking at the time. The game opened with the player looking out through the eyes Yasir Al-Fulan, the president of a nebulously defined Middle Eastern country, and the scene ended with his execution. The game wanted to make a point: no one was safe. The ultimate survival of the characters was called into question with this opening scene, and while American audiences see death in the Middle East on a nightly basis on the news, this scene showed us how cheap life is in first-person perspective.

You remember how the game made you feel

Games become great by giving you a feeling, scene, or image that sticks in your mind long after the credits have rolled. Call of Duty 4 gives you many of these scenes. 

After a series of missions where you begin to remember the feeling of being an unstoppable American killing machine, you’re told that there is a nuclear threat in the city. What’s expected is a mission where you race against time to disarm the bomb. What happens is a second later the bomb detonates, and you watch as the helicopters behind you spin out of control and crash. The sequence doesn’t end there; you wake up in the ruined city and die from your injuries.

None of this played by the rules of gaming, and it called everything else into question. Suddenly the world was in chaos, and the American flag wasn’t quite so bulletproof in this particular theater of operations. This is something a real soldier takes as a matter of course, but it’s a rare lesson in gaming.

Another mission that grabbed players’ attention allowed you to control an AC-130 gunship as targets were called out, spotted, and ultimately splashed across the countryside. While the actual shooting in Call of Duty 4 felt like a video game, this mirrored what we’ve watched on the evening news or on Wikileaks: the high-contrast night vision monochrome graphics, the calm voices of the soldiers as they order the deaths of other human beings, the ack-ack of the cannon fire.

Video games try to make us feel things by shoving us into the middle of them. This mission tried to make us feel by adding an extra level of artifice: we’re playing a video game of soldiers using weapons that make their experiences both look and feel like a video game. You don’t see the whites of anyone’s eyes, just blurry smoke as the munitions hit their targets.

A video very much like this has sparked a debate about target acquisition in the heat of battle, and while the game doesn’t deal with that issue, it does make the act of killing cold and dispassionate. In an industry where doing terrible things to other virtual people is par for the course, this scene is often held up as one of the more disturbing sections in modern gaming.

Multiplayer

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare was a monster hit, setting the stage for even more impressive sales figures of Modern Warfare 2. What made the game so compelling for so long was the ability to actually level up your multiplayer character, earning new guns and abilities as you played well… or poorly. The game spawned a devoted online following, and mods for the PC game continually gave the experience new life.