Interestingly, you do ultimately get to choose whether to throw him off the roof (the first and default option, of course), release him, or keep him for further interrogation. Of course, once we catch the man we’re after, we beat him and threaten to throw him off a roof until he tells us what we want to know, because in popular media torture is a good thing that always works. I figure we’re maybe three years away from the point where even the developers of Mortal Kombat will say, “Maybe tone it down a little, guys?” Don’t worry, says the other, “Everyone else we can turn to powder.” I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised when just a couple of minutes later, a prompt told me to press R3 for a “Brutal Melee Kill” and this resulted in my character jamming a knife into this person’s neck before grabbing their handgun and firing point blank into their face. As you begin your way, your companions complain about rules: “Do we really need to take this sonofabitch alive?” one asks. The first instruction you’re given is to “interrogate and neutralize” a target. In context, it is heavily implying that this man pulled the trigger that day-though this never comes up in any of the sequels.
Of course, Black Ops also ends with archival footage of JFK on the day he was assassinated, which the protagonist has been digitally inserted into.
Kennedy appears in the original Black Ops game from 2010, in a genuinely weird sequence where your character, in some sort of hallucination, points a handgun at the president as he authorizes the killing of a single target (as opposed to the blanket license to massacre that Reagan offers). The Black Ops sub-series has always hewed closer to real-world events than the other Call of Duty games, so Reagan’s appearance is not itself surprising. 1981: Ronald Reagan is now president, and he seems very keen on having his boys go out into the field and do bad things to presumably bad people. Where 2012’s Black Ops 2 started the near-future trend by taking place partly in 2025, the awkwardly named Black Ops Cold War sits firmly in the past. (And the complexity of supporting a half-dozen platforms is likely what’s been plaguing its launch.) Given that, it makes sense Treyarch would go back to the well and make something familiar.
I don’t envy the task they had for themselves: this is the first Call of Duty during the “cross-gen” period, where all major titles must support the existing platforms as well as the newly-released PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X. So, I gave it the benefit of the doubt…until Ronald Reagan showed up onscreen and told me to go do war crimes. While it’s unlikely that whomever handled the trailer didn’t understand the dog whistle they were sending-celebrated by at least one far-right YouTuber-it’s plausible everyone else was unaware of that context. Edward Griffin, a long-time member of the John Birch Society who in the years since has embraced 9/11 trutherism and HIV/AIDS denialism. If that weren’t enough, the interview was conducted by G. Of course, he doesn’t mention that in these interview clips, rather pointing to a potential big government voted in by “all the shmucks” as the next major danger-itself… not great. “Inspired by true events,” it says, over stock footage of soldiers and protesters and politicians as well as pieces of an interview with Soviet defector Yuri Bezmenov.īezmenov’s presence in this trailer caused controversy-as did the company’s decision to remove footage of Tiananmen Square to appease the Chinese government-because of, among other things, his belief that equality among genders, ethnicities, and sexualities is worthless and fights for it are actually just communist plots to destabilize America.
Yet that’s exactly how the latest entry in the long-running Call of Duty franchise, Black Ops Cold War, introduced itself. You’d expect it from tweets linking to whatever terrible thing just happened, but not so much in video game advertisements. How many times have we seen this sentiment, paraphrasing Spanish philosopher George Santayana? It must be thousands at this point, with a good half of them coming over the past four years. K now your history…or be doomed to repeat it.