Call of Duty: The Birth of a Franchise

Call of Duty (2003) Listen up, recruits—2003, Infinity Ward deploys Call of Duty onto

the PC battlefield. No console air support, just raw boots-on-the-ground action. You rotate through

three fronts: American paratrooper, British SAS, Soviet grunt. Translation: same

WWII objectives, just different accents yelling in your ear. Campaign combat

feels less like being a one-man army and more like you’re just another expendable rifle

in the killzone. Actual medkits scattered across the AO—because regenerative health hadn’t been invented

yet. You get shot, you patch yourself up with a Band-Aid you found in a trench.

Tactical realism, they called it. Multiplayer? Thirty-two operators max,