The world's best-selling video game shooter franchise has chosen one of the most entrenched real-world conflicts as the setting for its next instalment, with Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 thrusting players into a full-scale North Korean invasion of South Korea.
The game's developers, Infinity Ward, are already bracing for potential controversy around the decision, which presents a fictional version of what for many millions of people living on the Korean peninsula is a very real threat. The Korean War ended in 1953 with an armistice rather than a peace treaty, meaning the two countries technically remain at war.
The game, due for release on 23 October, puts players in the role of Private Park, a young South Korean conscript thrust into combat as North Korean missiles rain down on Seoul. Infinity Ward co-studio head Jack O'Hara said the Korean peninsula offered a perfect setting for what the studio calls 'ripping from the headlines'.
“The curious thing about North Korea and South Korea is they have been deadlocked since the Korean War,” he said at a press briefing this week. “It's kind of insane to realise that the capital of South Korea has these cannons pointed at it the entire time. When we talk to Koreans, it doesn't really phase them. It's not something that comes up often and seems so distant and unrealistic, but it's there.”
“I think it's a part of Modern Warfare's DNA – we can't shy away from the fact that we are representing the real world and using real locations,” he added. “Even though we do take some creative licence.”
Infinity Ward's narrative director Jeff Negus told Eurogamer the studio approached the setting as a storytelling exercise, emphasising that the focus is to provide entertainment. “We make an entertainment product. We're storytellers. The stakes involved in a story about warfare are the highest stakes that you can have — it's life or death. We approach it from the storytelling angle.”
The studio said it had consulted dialect coaches, cultural advisers, people whose parents had crossed the border from North Korea, and serving and former military personnel. It also maintains a dedicated Korean culture channel used internally to sense-check authenticity with Korean staff.
The Independent has approached Activision Blizzard, the company behind Call of Duty, for comment.
South Korean journalist Hyeonju Song told The Guardian she believed the game would cause pain regardless of its intentions. “Since the Korean War is a conflict that has not yet ended, I personally believe that creating fiction based on it is bound to cause pain to someone,” she said. “North and South Korea are still in a state of armistice, separated families who were torn apart by the war are still alive, and all South Korean men are required to perform mandatory military service. The war continues to directly impact our lives in Korea.”
She predicted controversies over historical accuracy and the appropriateness of the subject matter would eventually arise, particularly among families of Korean War veterans. “I suspect that such attempts are rare precisely because adding imagination to this unresolved history is viewed with caution,” she said.
The setting also comes at a geopolitically charged moment, with war in the Middle East increasing tensions globally. South Korea currently hosts the largest US overseas military base in the world, and the game's narrative of American and South Korean forces fighting together arrives as the Trump administration weighs moving some of its anti-missile systems out of South Korea and into the Middle East.
Call of Duty has been known to court controversy in the past, perhaps most memorably with a mission in 2009’s Modern Warfare 2, when players could take part in – or simply observe – a terrorist attack on a Moscow airport. The previous entry in the franchise, last year's Call of Duty: Black Ops 7, was widely considered a commercial disappointment, and Modern Warfare 4 faces stiff competition when it launches just weeks before the long-awaited Grand Theft Auto VI.
