Meet the studio behind Call of Duty: Black Ops and Zombies mode Before the reveal of Black Ops 4, Treyarch looks back at its work on Call of Duty By Charlie Hall@Charlie_L_Hall May 8, 2018, 11:00am EDT

 visit Treyarch, one of Activision’s most prolific studios. The invitation was fairly straightforward: Come to Santa Monica, California, for a full day. Talk with one of the teams working on Call of Duty, one of the world’s biggest video game franchises, and tell their story.

But Treyarch’s story is more than just the story of Black Ops, the popular subfranchise that the studio created. It’s also the story of the Zombies game mode, a whole othersubfranchise that Treyarch helped introduce to the world — one that’s now a staple of every modern Call of Duty release.

At the same time, it’s the story of how a group of specialized game developers put its own spin on Call of Duty’s multiplayer, a popular mode and a competitive esport in its own right.

It turns out that Treyarch’s story isn’t one single story at all. In actuality, it’s three stories rolled into one.

MONEYBALL

My day began with a walking tour of the studio. My guide was Treyarch chairman Mark Lamia. Aside from a southern Californian’s year-round tan, Lamia could easily be the sitcom stand-in for your average midwestern American dad. The only difference is that this dad has been making video games for more than 22 years.

The original Call of Duty was published for Windows PC in 2003.

 Infinity Ward/Activision

Lamia comes from the publishing world, where he worked, for a time, at Activision’s home base.

“We had started working with Infinity Ward on Call of Duty,” Lamia said. “We knew we were going to make an expansion pack and begin the franchise.” To make it happen, Activision tapped its newest acquisition, a small team called Gray Matter Interactive Studios.

Activision acquired Gray Matter in 2002, hot off the success of its critically acclaimed Return to Castle Wolfenstein, a first-person shooter that blended exceptional gunplay with the occult. Lamia said that Activision saw remarkable promise in the young studio and its team of around 20 talented developers. It put a lot of trust in them when it tasked them with creating the first expansion pack for Call of Duty, called United Offensive, in 2004.

But the resources required to make the next generation of first-person shooters were beyond them. They needed reinforcements, and they needed them badly.

“We saw that the asset requirements and just the demands of making these games required a lot. A lot of work and a lot of people,” Lamia said. “They were just too small of an organization. Meanwhile, Treyarch had some great console capabilities.”

Treyarch chairman Mark Lamia in the lobby of the studio’s offices near Los Angeles.

 Charlie Hall/Polygon

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Treyarch, another California game studio, punched well above its weight. It was banging out AAA titles at a blistering pace, releasing six full games across multiple genres on four platforms between 2002 and 2004. That’s part of the reason why Activision acquired it in 2001.

Treyarch/Activision

But the studio didn’t rest on its laurels. In 2005, the pace of its releases slowed down just a touch, but the risk ratcheted up. That’s the year Treyarch shipped both Ultimate Spider-Man and its own stand-alone Call of Duty title, a celebration of the U.S. Army’s First Infantry Division subtitled Big Red One.

It was around that time that Activision made the decision to fold Gray Matter and Treyarch together. In 2006, the newly integrated team turned on its heel and shipped Call of Duty 3. The following year, it launched Spider-Man 3. When Lamia arrived in 2008, the studio was nearing the release of three more AAA games at the same time. The work was grueling.

“We shipped Call of Duty: World at War and 007: Quantum of Solace —both shooters,” Lamia said, sounding tired for a moment. “Then, also, Spider-Man: Web of Shadows with our partner studio at Shaba Games. It became evidently clear that this team was onto something special inside the Call of Duty franchise, and if I could just focus them and could get all those teams together and working together, I thought we could do something great.”

The challenge, Lamia said, was convincing the folks back at Activision to give Treyarch the time and the resources to make it happen.

TIME ENOUGH AT LAST

“Working at that pace was one of the most challenging things ever. It was brutal,” Lamia said. “I was able to talk to Activision. I said, ‘Instead of us having to make three games at the same time, can we put all of our attention, all of our focus, can we have all of our leadership directed on making one great game?”

Lamia said it was in part his efforts on behalf of the team at Treyarch that got the studio the luxury of taking two full years to create Call of Duty: Black Ops, one of the most successful titles in the franchise’s history.

“I just wanted these teams to be able to do their best at whatever they were doing,” he said. “I felt like spreading our focus across multiple games didn’t allow us to do that. So Black Ops was really the first time we were able to entirely focus all of our efforts.”

Call of Duty: Black Ops tells a fictional story centered around the CIA’s clandestine operations in locations such as Laos, Kazakhstan and Cuba.

 Treyarch/Activision

We stood in a narrow hallway as he said it, surrounded by art from those first few Call of Duty titles that the unified Gray Matter and Treyarch teams had made, together. Lamia cracked a half smile while pointing at the framed, poster-sized copy of Black Ops’ original cover.

“Of course, then we went ahead and made three games in one instead of three separate games.”

In the end, Activision’s gamble was a success. Combining Gray Matter with Treyarch paid off. The new studio flourished.

Call of Duty: Black Ops was released in 2010. By Activision’s account, it set an “entertainment launch opening record.” The first title in the series sold so well that the publisher compared Call of Duty’s achievements not against those of other video games, but against those of the movie industry. It was followed by Black Ops 2 in 2012 and later by Black Ops 3, which were likewise wildly successful.

Treyarch’s series gave the Call of Duty franchise something it had never had before: a contiguous storyline. The Black Ops games carry players through fictional portrayals of the United States’ lesser-known, covert misadventures in Asia, the Caribbean and Central America. Black Ops 3 in particular extended that narrative out into the speculative future of warfare.

The Black Ops series stood apart from Activision’s other blockbuster titles produced by its stable of high-achieving studios — games like Modern Warfare, Advanced Warfare and Infinite Warfare. Treyarch’s single-player campaigns remained cohesive and distinct, telling a parallel tale of espionage and heroism.

Before, where Treyarch was merely one of several studios doing its part toiling away in the Call of Duty universe, today it feels as though Treyarch could have the momentum to truly push the Call of Duty franchise forward.

Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 moved the series into the speculative future of warfare, including one scene where troops dropped into combat flying powered wing suits.

 Treyarch/Activision

THE SHAMBLING DEAD

Oddly enough, it could be said that Treyarch’s biggest achievement hasn’t been the single-player story that it has feathered together over the years. Rather, it’s the studio’s bizarre foray back into the occult, something it hadn’t dabbled in since Gray Matter’s visit to Castle Wolfenstein. It’s a wild amalgam of history, fantasy, militaria and pop culture known as Call of Duty’s Zombies mode.

Dan Bunting, co-studio head of Treyarch, said that Zombies evolved almost organically from the work on 2008’s Call of Duty: World at War. At the time, his team had already spent months ripping its proprietary software apart to support a new and ambitious feature — a multiplayer cooperative mode. While the guts of the engine were exposed, a small team at Treyarch got a wild idea.

“We were on two-year development cycles,” Bunting began, with almost a sigh of relief. “The first year was like taking the car engine apart. All the pieces were laying on the floor, and then we had to put it back together [...] so you could actually play it.”

Treyarch/Activision

“There was this learning process,” Bunting continued. “It wasn’t until the early part of the second year, where it’s like, ‘Man, [...] the most fun you can have is just defending an objective with each other!’ Those defend events were the most fun that you could have in cooperative play.