I’m heading out to buy my copy of Call of Duty Black Ops and have a few thoughts before go. Multiplayer online games have been part of my life since the mid-1990′s. It was lonely in those days, firing up the old 28k modem and a bit of hope to connect with friends. I remember wanting to play certain games like flight sims and there just not being enough opponents around. The graphics were quite bad so I had to use the imagination to sufficiently suspend reality. Yes, I remember literally stalking the truck that delivered some of the 3DFX Voodoo 2 graphics cards to my neighborhood. If you were a gamer, you were a geek in those days.
I find myself going out to make a purchase of around $60 for a game I have not tried the beta for and which I feel confident I don’t need to try. I know for certain that Call of Duty: Black Ops will be fun not just because the last title proved loads of fun, Modern Warfare 2, but because of the unprecedented consumer demand. For this game to fail, it would be like a dud Spielberg film or a bitter Starbucks latte. Activision could charge $120 per copy and double their revenue, if they wanted.
Another thing. I will probably finish the single player version of the game in days and move on to the longer lasting, competitive arena of multiplayer, which I’ll play for at least a year. I’ll get my money’s worth and it might even keep my out of trouble in the real world. Today the online aspect of games has become the dominant mode over single player because gaming is now solidly social.
This stuff is seriously main stream now. It’s funny. Everytime I wear the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 T-shirt my wife gave me for Christmas last year, people everywhere start coming up to me with that glimmer in their eye saying
Great game, man.
To which I agree and then inevitably the question of what platform do you play on comes up, to which I reply “PC” and they usually reply Playstation or Xbox. But, that brings me to another point. It doesn’t matter what platform you play on anymore. It’s the same game. You know the guy has experienced the thrill of killstreaks and the undying agony of stolen care packages. It’s a high five, bonding type moment.
It’s no longer lonely being an online gamer. It’s no longer slow. No longer pixelated. And just as I’m writing this, I look at Kobe Bryant in the Activision Call of Duty: Black Ops commercial and realize that it’s no longer considered geeky to spend many hours in front of a screen without eating or sleeping. The future of online gaming looks even better than it did before.
Call of Duty: Black Ops TV Commercial “There’s a Soldier in All of Us”
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