In 2008, Call of Duty: World at War released the last great WW2 campaign for Activision’s never-ending FPS series. While the campaign itself was pretty damn great, it’s post-credits ending was mind-blowing as players were treated to the fearful Nazi Zombies.
While many are now used to the idea of Call of Duty coming alongside a Zombies component nowadays, the first instance of CoD Zombies was truly shocking. After fighting through a cinematic, albeit often still horrific, replica of World War 2, you were placed in a boarded up hut covered in fog with the undead slowly shuffling towards you.
Nacht der Untoten is still the scariest Nazi Zombies has ever been in Call of Duty. It’s tight, bombed-out three-room bunker doesn’t give you much space. In the original level, the point isn’t to win, it’s just to survive: you’re not finding objectives and finishing a storyline. You’re fighting until the very end.
Obviously, Call of Duty: Zombies has changed a lot since this first entry. After all, CoD itself has changed a lot. Zombies maps now are about puzzles, stories, and easter eggs, but the core fun of shooting zombies to grab points to unlock guns and areas is still as satisfying now as it was back in 2008.
Why then has Activision never released a full Call of Duty: Zombies spin-off? There have been attempts. Every few years there’s a rumour that an actual CoD Zombies spin-off game is in development, but we’re still yet to see one. It’s a shame. As Call of Duty continues to barrel forth as a live-service title, a standalone Zombies game serves as the best possible vehicle for what live-service is.
Imagine a standalone Zombies game and what it could offer. The core Call of Duty gameplay doesn’t need to change at all to serve as a strong foundation for a decade of Zombies content. In fact, with Modern Warfare 4 having some of the best core gunplay in CoD history, that title would serve as brilliant bones for a Zombies-only game.
While many have grown tired of stupid skins and celebrity cameos in mainline CoD games, they make sense in the overblown, silly world of Call of Duty: Zombies. No one batted an eye at David Hasselhoff in Infinite Warfare’s bizarre 80s Zombies mode, and no one would really bat an eye at Seth Rogen, Nicki Minaj, or Nick Cage shooting their way through a gothic cathedral filled with the undead.
CoD Zombies has already gone to the moon, theme parks, a lava-covered city with an active bus route, and The Pentagon. It’s a game mode designed entirely around inventive and silly locales with silly objectives (undead monkeys, anyone?) and it can be expanded in a million different ways with new guns, locations, objectives, game modes, and, of course, stupid skins to make more money.
The only reason Call of Duty: Zombies hasn’t become its own standalone game is because of the fact that Zombies still sells copies of mainline CoD games. To this day, there are still people that will only buy a new CoD if Zombies is included, but the game mode has evolved so much that keeping it tied to a semi-annual release of another game feels like its actually restricting what it could be.
It’s time for Call of Duty: Zombies to have its own standalone game with its own post-launch ideas. While we often bemoan the live-service industry, Zombies is undeniably the perfect vessel for it, and it should free up mainline CoD to try out new ideas that could create the next 18-year-long game mode for the series.
