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Steven Spielberg started Medal Of Honor," says artist Brad Allen.
It was super neat to get to work on a Spielberg project."
Brad’s role at 2015 Inc was his first games industry job.
“But it was really fun.”
He arrived at Tulsa International Airport on 15 December 2000, when development on Allied Assault was already underway.
“We even had a tornado once.”
The weather was tolerable because the work was fulfilling.
With the Nineties over, Medal Of Honor: Allied Assault looked like the future.
“This was subdued and realistic looking, and all the colours were drab.
It was much more rich and interesting, the way they were presenting it.”
D-day
This feature originally appeared inRetro Gamer magazine.
The foundations for Call Of Duty were set here, in the shadow of Spielberg.
This was an interactive Saving Private Ryan or Band Of Brothers.
Jason West had joined the team as a programmer to work on a console port.
“But then I think Vince Zampella convinced him to take over,” Robert says.
“He became pretty much the lead of Allied Assault.
We were a bunch of mod authors and he came on and got us meeting the schedule.”
“Everybody wanted to put the special sauce on it and spend the extra hours.
It was really a fun experience, minus a few other things.”
“We weren’t going to get a good deal with the owner of 2015,” Robert says.
“Jason, Vince and Grant [Collier] wanted a better deal where we got royalty sharing.”
Resolving to set up a new company, a handful of key staff started to make moves.
“We had no idea what the name of the company was going to be.
We just started spitballing ideas for games.
So it was really exciting.
There were a ton of different ideas floating around and options that we could have done.”
Yet the first thing the new Infinity Ward worked on was, in fact, Medal Of Honor.
More precisely, an add-on pack for Allied Assault at the behest of EA.
Many packed up and vacated the 2015 Inc office overnight.
So we didn’t have a way to let him know.
He shows up the next day, and everybody’s gone.
He may have been a little bewildered."
The change and bewilderment didn’t end there.
“We were about to go under and get absorbed into the EA collective,” Brad says.
“And Activision swooped in.
They were like, ‘Hey, we’ll fund your next project.
If you work for us, you’ve got the option to stay together as a team.’
And that was a really big issue for us, because we really liked working with each other.”
“It’s a family jot down of thing,” Robert says.
Twenty-two people had worked on Medal Of Honor: Allied Assault.
The team occupied the 37th floor of the 60-story CityPlex tower.
“Thirty-seven flights of stairs is not fun for fire alarms,” Robert says.
“After the first alarm I said, ‘I’m not trashing my knees anymore.
If it burns down, it burns down.'”
Infinity Ward was led by West, Zampella and Courier.
“To fund Call Of Duty, Grant was maxing out his credit card originally,” Robert says.
“He was important from a biz point of view.
And he got paid out well in the end.”
West was the creative force, however steering the team through a tight 18 months of development.
We’d prioritise them and go down the list.
We were scarred pretty badly from Allied Assault, where it got delayed."
The team put together a detailed design doc something they wouldn’t bother with on later projects.
“I guess we were trying to impress Activision,” Robert says.
“And Jason wanted to double-check we were on track.”
“We said, ‘OK, we’ll add multiplayer.’
By Modern Warfare, half the development was on multiplayer.
Earlier on, it was just minimal.”
“Probably at one point it was more than three,” Brad says.
“It was a learning experience.
Everybody was free to contribute.”
The decision to back multiple protagonists would have huge implications for COD’s future of perspective-swapping stories.
“It didn’t feel as realistic.
We wanted to represent everybody that contributed to that part of history.”
Nonetheless, Infinity Ward wanted to ramp up the grittiness and intensity.
“There was a lot of cool attention to detail that was put into that,” Brad says.
“We wanted it to feel like the player was the person, and the immersion was the thing.
And it didn’t have to be a name that went with a character that you were playing.
Brad was one of five artists on a team that ultimately totalled 26.
“And a lot of people wore a lot of different hats,” he says.
“That was a good aspect of a small company.
You’re able to play with whatever you’re free to.”
Brad got to animate the ship as it sank into the depths.
“It was a learning experience.
Everybody was free to contribute.”
And if an idea didn’t work out, nobody got into trouble.
“Maybe it would stick, or somebody might be able to help make it better.”
It’s a scene pulled directly from the film.
“Actually, there was talk that Activision wanted to make a Band Of Brothers series.
But then they’d have to pay licensing.
I don’t think it would’ve been the best decision.”
The team was hungry for any new piece of cinema that featured the Second World War.
“That helped us with setting things apart visually,” Brad says.
“Luckily there was a nice wealth of really strong cinematography.
Research tools were worth their weight in gold.
“Whatever books we could find,” Brad says.
“Whatever things we could find on the internet.
For the second COD, we sent a bunch of guys to different places for photo reference.
But for the first one it was all aboutGoogle.”
Infinity Ward bought model kits, and visited tank and aircraft museums on photo safaris.
You don’t want everything to look perfect, even though probably at the time it was brand-new.
If you throw a little dirt and rust on it in the game, it just looks cool.”
Legendary military consultant Dale Dye returned, having worked with the team on Medal Of Honor.
“He said, ‘No matter what, they have to get from point A to point B.’
If the AI doesn’t get there, the level’s broken, it’s not going to continue.
“It’s pretty crazy,” Brad says.
“He made it all the way to Modern Warfare.
He’s one of the key guys now, he was the guy that stuck.
Everybody was meant to be, not throwaway, but they weren’t supposed to be the heroes.
Everybody was supposed to be a hero, so nobody was supposed to be the main badass.”
“We were more than just coworkers,” Robert says.
We were all there as many hours as we could be.”
There were no demands that staff show up on the weekends.
“But a lot of people were, because that was the mentality,” Brad says.
Or else we wouldn’t get to make another game.
There were a lot of unspoken stresses.”
“You wouldn’t get the sense that you were working at Activision,” he says.
“We were insulated from disputes over what was going to happen on the game.
That would be Vince and Jason talking with Activision behind closed doors, and we’d be shielded.”
“And designers are trying to outdo each other with the cool scenes.
To the publisher’s credit, it often gave the team space to do their best work.
The team at Infinity Ward was already proven, thanks to its work on Medal Of Honor.
“EA had crazy awesome marketing at the time for Medal Of Honor,” Brad says.
“So we would see their commercials coming out, beautiful movie trailer-jot down things with live action.
And we were like, ‘Oh, man, that looks so good.'”
“On Allied Assault, we were trying to outdo the console Medal Of Honor,” he says.
“For Call Of Duty, we were going against EA’s Allied Assault expansion, Spearhead.
It’s like a bogeyman.”
Robert compares the process of pulling Call Of Duty together to being in a Quake clan.
“Obviously things can go wrong and you start shouting at each other,” he says.
“And designers are trying to outdo each other with the cool scenes.
The push to the end was frantic and exciting.
“And then you’re just waiting for the reviews to come out,” Robert says.
“That was the first shot of drugs in the vein.”
Call Of Duty was hailed as a masterpiece, with scores over 90%.
“We were just happy that it was well received,” Brad says.
The day after launch, Activision acquired Infinity Ward.
In 2020 alone, Call Of Duty made Activision over $3 billion.
“They got us for a song,” Brad says.
“That was a super good business decision.”
They didn’t have their act together.”
“It was obviously based on Halo, because they had their shields,” Robert says.
“You don’t want the game to become this treasure hunt for health packs.
The shift reflected a growing concern with approachability.
“We were trying to get maximum sales,” Robert says.
We’d get the receptionist doing playtesting, people who hadn’t played games before.
“As a company, we had made three World War II games, including Medal Of Honor.
And so we were like, ‘Can we change this up?
We’ve been making World War II longer than World War II lasted.'”
Call Of Duty became a water-cooler game, its campaign twists discussed on lunch breaks in schools and offices.
It secured the future of the series for many more years to come.
“We weren’t expecting it,” Brad says.
But the success of that was ridiculous.
It was a cool and fortunate experience not all companies get to stick together that long.”
This feature originally appeared in Retro Gamer magazine.
