While it’s hard to feel sorry for a franchise as massively successful and critically acclaimed as Infinity Ward’s Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, the fact that, according to the game’s developers, Activision was deathly opposed to the idea of moving the franchise out of the World War II setting almost brings a tear to my eye.

In an interview with the Official PlayStation Magazine (via CVG), Infinity Ward head Vince Zampella revealed that his team had been fighting with Activision over making a modern-day Call of Duty game going back to Call of Duty 2. But according to Zampella, “Activision really wanted it, the compromise sort of being that we’d get some dev kits for consoles in exchange for doing a World War 2 game.” This is what allowed IW to make the leap to consoles, which it had apparently always wanted to do but couldn’t because of Activision’s restrictions.

But when it finally came time for IW to start working on Modern Warfare, Activision once again stood firmly against the idea. “They thought working on a modern game was risky and [thought], ‘oh my god you can’t do that, it’s crazy!’ they were doing market research to show us we were wrong the whole time,” Zampella said. And wrong they were, as Modern Warfare then went on to ship over 14 million units and garner countless awards along the way.

So the next time you’re enjoying a little Modern Warfare or drooling over footage from the upcoming Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, give a little tip of the hat to IW for successfully navigating the treacherous world of Activision’s bottom-line-first mentality. See? You kind of want to cry a little. No?[Via g4tv]

Posted: Oct 06, 2009 10:57 pm