Call of Duty: Black Ops 6’s Zombies mode isn’t just a great return to form; it’s a time machine.
Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 is more than another numbered entry in the popular subseries. It’s far more than a well-designed first-person shooter composed of a high-octane single-player campaign, a robust and deeply enjoyable competitive multiplayer suite, and an off-the-wall cooperative horde mode.
It’s a time machine.That was then …
It’s the summer of 2011 and the apartment is sweltering. My mom is hunched over the stove or running up and down the apartment with a mop. A nondescript bachata song is blaring on the stereo installed above the microwave. My brother is locked away in our room, or out with some friends, and my father is away at work. All the while, I’m firmly rooted to my couch, as if time has allowed vines to spring up and fix me to the spot. A Dualshock 3 is in my hand, a poor excuse of a headset sits on my head.
I’m playing Call of Duty: Black Ops‘ cooperative Zombies mode with my best friends.
That summer, I must’ve lived on that couch. No matter the occasion, I dialed in from the moment I woke up to the wee hours of the next morning. No inconvenience — idle talk, chores, or any responsibility shy of eating and using the bathroom — kept us from partying up, jumping into a round of Zombies, and trying to solve the mode’s inscrutable Easter eggs, all the while surviving as long as we could. As kids, we were possessed with a drive to unlock the unfathomably weird depth of these puzzles, which grew from musical triggers into mechanisms for a larger and more ambitious narrative than I previously thought possible of the Call of Duty machine.
Zombies came complete with a cast of playable weirdos, but grew to feature even more unseen and odd elements like the interdimensional entity Samantha Maxis, a nefarious research unit named Group 935, and various survivors that would eventually be split over numerous timelines. The Easter eggs that delivered these narratives were a series of vague puzzles built into every subsequent map that encouraged players to work together in a way that was novel for the series. And each one grew more convoluted and ambitious than the last.
We pored over endless videos and written guides, gathered parts and weapons, followed all types of obscure steps, and even completed our own set of experiments while just waiting for audio-visual cues that suggested we were successfully unlocking some set of mysteries. The promise at the end of it has always been a full loadout of empowering perks and some narrative payoff, but to be honest, I think we mostly did it for the thrill of the hunt and the fun of having an excuse to bounce off of each other for hours on end.… this is now
Now it’s the winter of 2024 and the apartment is freezing. It sits mostly vacant, mostly still. Mom and Dad are in their own place in a nearby state, and I miss them and those halcyon days filled with their idle chatter, gossip, and ranting. My brother is still never here, but that’s because he’s got a long-term partner and my two wonderful nephews. He lives a few neighborhoods away now. There’s nobody really coming to and fro, and the only music that ever echoes throughout the house anymore is my occasional wailing session on a borrowed guitar, the “whiny emo” playlist that Spotify suggests to me every now and then, or the hefty boom of my roommate’s cacophonous sound setup.
