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.
And miraculously, I’m playing Call of Duty: Black Ops 6‘s cooperative Zombies mode with my very same best friends and finally solving an Easter egg.
Since it was released at the tail end of October, Black Ops 6 has been repeatedly championed as a return to form. The campaign has earned plaudits for its constant innovation, and the multiplayer suite has been praised for many returning features that players have missed for some time now, but my time has largely been consumed by Zombies. I am completely enraptured by its two maps, Liberty Falls and Terminus, in a way that hasn’t felt true since that summer many years ago, where we spent multiple rounds across multiple days trying to decipher the mysteries of maps like Ascension. I still remember hitting hidden triggers, throwing special grenades over fences to produce some kind of effect, and blowing up a rocket to earn some special reward. And I’m so happy that this new, yet nonetheless classic iteration of Zombies in Black Ops 6 retains the mode’s deeply weird heart and penchant for similar experimentation that I so fondly remember.
Naturally, my friends and I have picked it back up like we never stopped being those hungry kids. I rarely marathon games anymore outside of professional obligation, but Black Ops 6′s Zombies compels me, primarily because it withholds so many small treats to discover alongside my favorite people.
Pinching myself
The introductory map, Liberty Falls, contains a bunch of innocuous little mysteries that have been an absolute delight to uncover. For example, smacking a vending machine near the beginning of the map can grant players resources once a round, like crafting materials or a wonder weapon, which is a part of Zombies’ larger-than-life arsenal of sci-fi and mystical weapons. Dislodging a hard-to-see helmet makes zombies fall from the sky at the foot of the church steps, yielding extra points. You can make the undead dance as part of one Easter egg, or go bowling as part of another. My favorite Easter egg on the map lets you transform into a laser-shooting statue of a comic book superheroine.
It takes more than decent aim and a good trigger finger to get the most out of it.
At times like this, I can’t believe I’m playing Call of Duty, the standard-bearer for the AAA first-person shooter that has produced some enthralling games in the past and also provided a sanitized template from which most other games of that ilk pull from.
Terminus, the moodier and more ambitious of the two stages, contains a literal hidden treasure. You can collect a bunch of stuffed animals and combine them into a sentient flying turret that revives downed players. And while many of the story-heavy Easter eggs across the series’ history gesture at some dramatic moments — the destruction of Earth and subsequent creation of alternate timelines ranks among them — Terminus’ main quest features an abundance of thrilling set pieces that drop you directly into the action, the last of which feels like Call of Duty’s closest approximation of a raid encounter and is as raucous as the mode from which it was born. It is massive, comes complete with phases, and has attacks that can wipe out every player on the stage if they aren’t careful.
Considering the exhaustive steps that have to be completed to get there and the coordination required to get through it, the feeling of completing the Terminus Easter egg (a feat we never managed as dumb kids) feels equal to my triumphs over Destiny raids over the years, which is to say, its completion sincerely ranks among the highlights of my time spent gaming, period.
I love the casual feeling of Zombies — which excels as a sandbox to mindlessly toil away in for several minutes or hours — but its greatest strength is how it encourages its audience to become a different kind of player in a manner that is unique to the other segments of the Call of Duty package. It takes more than decent aim and a good trigger finger to get the most out of it. For one, it takes a decent imagination. Its maps aren’t arenas, like you’d find in multiplayer games; they’re clearly puzzle boxes, and the audience that loves this mode is as entranced by the minutiae of them as I am.
Friends though thick and thin
In 2011, I didn’t have as much of a digital footprint. I wasn’t big on social media, and there really wasn’t much of it to be big on. In 2024, me and my best friends are being algorithmically fed TikToks, Instagram Reels, and Reddit threads of other savvy players making discoveries that we can then send to each other and test out for ourselves the next time we run it back.
And along the way, I’ve had the same two stalwart friends accompanying me through it all. They may register as footnotes in this story at first, but their timeless and unwavering passion for these puzzles has kept me going more times than I can count. I would have never fallen in love with this mode and its weirdness if not for their devotion to it and me. The truth is I’d be lost, both in-game and outside of it all, without them. Our friendship was forged over restless nights in our youth picking away at these Easter eggs, and we’ve become so thoroughly and unshakably entangled in one another’s lives that we’re still making wonderful memories experimenting in this sandbox more than a decade later. Finally finishing these arduous puzzles alongside them is a better reward than any calling card, character skin, or collection of perks that the game can muster.
A lot has changed over the years, but I’m glad that after all that time, dropping us into a Zombies lobby produces the same magnificently weird effect. I desperately hope that remains true for years to come.
The year is to be determined and the weather is anything you can imagine. Maybe the house is empty, but hopefully it’s not. I hope music is filling the halls of that future home, but I guess it falls on a version of myself that doesn’t exist yet to make sure of it. Regardless, I can see it. I’m planted on that couch, with a proper headset adorning my head, and a controller in my hand. My eyes are excitedly darting around the giant television trying to follow the action of the session, and I’m hooting and hollering into the microphone. Me and my best friends are goofing off and performing the now ritualistic movements of an Easter egg we’ve committed to memory after doing this time and time again.
We never stopped, and we never plan to.