This is an IGN opinion piece from Ryan McCaffrey, who worked at Official Xbox Magazine from 2002-2012 during the original Xbox and Xbox 360 era before joining IGN, where he remains “the Xbox guy.” In the run-up to Xbox’s 25th anniversary, he’ll be sharing his memories from the platform’s first quarter-century.
Younger readers might not remember a time when Call of Duty wasn’t one of the biggest franchises in all of gaming, but I promise you that there was a time. I had played the original on PC — the only platform it had been released on — back in 2003. And, yes, I quite liked it. It was an excellent World War 2-set military first-person shooter.
When it came time for the sequel in 2005, which was slated to be a day-one launch title for the then-upcoming Xbox 360 console, my Official Xbox Magazine colleagues and I were excited about it, but it wasn’t necessarily the most anticipated Xbox 360 launch game. (In hindsight, nothing really was; while the original Xbox had a killer app in Halo: Combat Evolved, it had little else in its launch lineup, whereas the Xbox 360 had a few excellent games — like Project Gotham Racing 3, Condemned: Criminal Origins, and of course Call of Duty 2 — but no Halo-level must-haves.)
My eager but not feverish anticipation for Call of Duty 2 changed when I got to go to Infinity Ward in the summer of 2005 to do a cover story on Infinity Ward’s sequel. And I remember very clearly what jumped out at my first as I was shown an early mission from the campaign: the volumetric smoke effects. With the increased horsepower of the Xbox 360, smoke grenades mattered more than ever during gameplay, as tossing them to obscure the enemy’s vision while you darted across the path nearby Axis a-holes was integrated into the mission design.
With the increased horsepower of the Xbox 360, smoke grenades mattered more than ever during gameplay.“
It was a really fun way to work the Xbox 360’s new tricks into the action. Couple that with the excellent sound effects and surround-sound audio work the Xbox had baked in (in fairness, the original Xbox was also fully 5.1-capable) and I suddenly found myself looking forward to Call of Duty 2 more than any other game in the 360’s rather large launch lineup.
Fast-forward to the fall of that year and the imminent launch of the new Xbox. As I’ve mentioned before in some of my other Xbox 25th anniversary look-backs at my favorite games from the platform’s past, magazines are made well in advance in order to allow time for printing and shipping to our hundreds of thousands of subscribers. This meant that we typically got access to review builds of games well in advance (think: two months). This was usually no problem for developers to provide, as the submission builds they’d submit to the Xbox certification team were typically pretty final; the age of day-one patches had not yet dawned.
But in this case, I had to go to the game, rather than the other way around, as security was tight around both the new Xbox and the new Call of Duty. And so I returned to Infinity Ward in southern California to spend a few days reviewing Call of Duty 2. I began with campaign before moving to multiplayer (against the Infinity Ward QA testers and multiplayer team, who had the distinct advantage of having played dozens if not hundreds of hours of multiplayer compared to my zero hours). Remember earlier when I said I quite enjoyed the original Call of Duty on PC? Call of Duty 2’s campaign on Xbox 360 was significantly better. More action, more drama, more tension. It was wildly impressive by any metric, which was especially important considering that Call of Duty multiplayer had not yet established itself as the main reason many people bought each new game.
Make no mistake, though: multiplayer was awesome. Multiple game modes, a short TTK (remember, it was all pretty new at the time!), killer graphics, and don’t forget it was the pre-Party Chat era when most people actually used the Chat Headset bundled with every Xbox 360 and communicated with their teammates. Looking back, it was the beginning of the end of Halo’s reign as the king of console shooters. Halo 2 was absolutely still being played by a ton of people after the Xbox 360 launched (as you may recall, Halo 1 and 2 were the first two backwards compatible games with Xbox 360, and that compatibility was baked into the new console out of the box), and Halo 3 would have its moment two years later…right before Infinity Ward’s next project, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, took the crown from Halo for good.
Call of Duty 2 was, quite simply, the right game at the right time for Xbox 360. It showed gamers what the new console was capable of while also being a stellar game regardless of platform. It probably wouldn’t hold up today, honestly, but if you had the pleasure of being there at the time, it was a heck of a moment in the history of Xbox.
25 Years of Xbox
For more of my memories from across a quarter-century of writing about Xbox games, check out these other stories:
Ryan McCaffrey is IGN’s executive editor of previews and host of IGN’s weekly Xbox show, Podcast Unlocked, and a co-host of Next-Gen Console Watch. He’s a North Jersey guy, so it’s “Taylor ham,” not “pork roll.” Debate it with him on Twitter at @DMC_Ryan.