Before the Call of Duty series shifted to shock-em stories and recycled shoot-em-up gameplay, there was Modern Warfare, an unexpectedly excellent installment that catapulted Activision’s popular first-person bullet-slinger out of the Second World War and into a crazy ultranationalists-gone-wild future one.
Much of its appeal lay in that shift to modern times, but also in the expert way developer Infinity Ward unfurled the game’s multi-character story, which shifted between a civil war-torn Russia in 2011 and a flashback mission in Pripyat, Ukraine, post-Chernobyl, that cleverly set up the game’s antagonist.
But above all else, Modern Warfare was celebrated for its multiplayer wrinkles, namely innovations like “killstreaks” — special abilities during missions like calling in airstrikes, helicopter support and radar-blocking EMP that only unlocked if you dispatched a certain number of enemies, cumulatively, without dying.