Medal of Honor: Allied Assault was a big deal back in 2002. Its cinematic take on World War II, and especially the Omaha Beach landing, earned it our Best Action Game of the Year award, and made it one of 2002’s must-play games. The third in the Medal of Honor series, it had been farmed out to a new developer called 2015, Inc. Publisher Electronic Arts decided not to keep 2015 on for the inevitable follow-up, however, bringing the series in-house.
Which left 2015 at a loose end. Having been given a tight deadline to crank out a franchise entry and then absolutely smashing it, the studio assumed it would be allowed a second chance. When EA decided not to keep them around, a chunk of 2015 including Allied Assault’s development director Vince Zampella went to EA’s rival Activision, started a new studio called Infinity Ward, and invented Call of Duty.
If EA had kept them around, 2015 would presumably have happily kept making Medal of Honor games for them and Call of Duty wouldn’t have become a thing. Or, to put it another way, “The only reason that Call of Duty exists is because EA were dicks,” as Zampella recently told GQ Magazine.
It’s an incredible own-goal in the history of videogame development. That first Call of Duty builds directly on what Allied Assault did, only swapping its primary influence from Saving Private Ryan to Enemy at the Gates, with a recreation of that movie’s “the one with the rifle shoots” scene. Its biggest change was the introduction of multiple protagonists, letting players see the war from different viewpoints, which would become a core part of the series’ singleplayer campaigns. It’s easy to see how it could have been Medal of Honor 4, and in an alternate timeline led to Medal of Honor still being one of the big names in the FPS genre.
This bit of ancient videogame history came up because Zampella is back in the trenches of both World War II and the conflict between EA and Activision. As boss of Battlefield, Zampella is back on the EA side of the rivalry for Battlefield 6, which recently launched to a peak of 747,000 players on Steam and a spot in its all-time top 20. Presumably EA stopped being dicks at some point between then and now.
