“50,000 people used to live here. Now it’s a ghost-town.”
The camera tilts upward, revealing a flyover view of a city, the image desaturated and grainy, as if recorded on a 90s camcorder. We see tower-blocks, trees, and behind them both, a Ferris wheel silhouetted against a slate-grey sky. The camera moves closer to the wheel, which is now revealed to be flaking with rust. As the camera tracks upward from the wheel’s base, four words are spelled out in night-vision green. “Pripyat, Ukraine. Chernobyl outskirts.”
This was the world’s first glimpse of Modern Warfare, the game which transformed Call of Duty – already a successful franchise, into the AAA behemoth that it remains today. I’ve always been fascinated by the decision-making process which led to that trailer being structured in that way. Call of Duty 4 is a game which features daring black-ops raids, contemporary middle-eastern conflicts, atomic explosions. And yet Activision decided that the first thing the world saw of a game titled Modern Warfare would be a Soviet city abandoned in 1986.
Source: Eurogamer How Chernobyl cast its shadow over video games