Call of Duty is one of the biggest gaming franchises to ever hit Xbox. Some would argue that the success of the early Modern Warfare games catapulted the Xbox 360 to the top of the console charts and helped it stay there for years.
There has been at least one COD game released for an Xbox console every year since 2003! The longevity and proliferacy are insane, especially for an FPS game. Many games (and entire franchises) have come and gone in that time within this genre, yet Call of Duty lives on. So, we’ve dedicated this article to the biggest and most renowned gaming franchise of all time by fishing out some crazy facts!
Call of Duty 4 Was Turned Into A Slot Machine
Anyone born in the 90s will recognise COD4 as the ultimate FPS game. It’s the most iconic Call of Duty game for this generation as it was released when most of them were just starting secondary school. It also came around at the perfect time in the console era; this was when the Xbox 360 and PS3 were battling with one another.
To say the game was a roaring success would be the understatement of the decade.
It pushed the boundaries of multiplayer FPS titles and since then all other games have been trying to replicate the way this one felt. But, did you know that Call of Duty 4 was so big it got turned into a slot machine? You can play it at sites offering free spins no deposit not on GamStop bonuses and it’s a walk down memory lane. All the same sounds and music from the game are included, though it’s a bit surreal to see it in slot form.
COD4 joins a very short list of games that got turned into slots and is the only title from the whole franchise to receive this treatment.
Black Ops 2 Caused A Lawsuit From A Dictator’s Family
It’s not every day that a game gets sued by a dictator’s family, but that’s what happened when Black Ops 2 was released in 2012. The game includes a depiction of Jonas Savimbi, a former Angolan warlord who passed away in 2002. Without wanting to get too dark or graphic, reports of Savimbi’s actions during his time are horrendous, to say the least. He was a known dictator who became a symbol for everything that was wrong with Angola during the 1980s. His death in 2002 was celebrated in the capital city – so that tells you about his reputation.
Black Ops 2 briefly showed him rallying his troops and killing people – which his family took offence to. They tried to sue Activision for this and the case lasted a few years before finally ending in 2016. The BBC reported that his family lost the case as the judge ruled that the depiction was fair and they couldn’t argue that he wasn’t a savage warlord.
It’s probably one of the weirdest stories and lawsuits to come out of the video game world. Perhaps this is why most Call of Duty games tend to shy away from mentioning real people or using real likenesses – you never know who’s going to try and sue you!
Call of Duty Is The 5th Best-Selling Video Game Franchise Ever
Initially, this fact has the air of that meme where the guy’s popping champagne and celebrating on a podium, only for the next slide to show him down in 5th place. You don’t get prizes for coming fifth in anything – but this is a monumental achievement when you consider how vast the video game world is.
The current standings on Wikipedia show that over 425 million copies of Call of Duty have been sold to date. Three things make this fact even more impressive:
- The first three games on the list are Mario, Tetris and Pokemon, all of which have been out for far longer and are played primarily on handheld Nintendo consoles in Asia. This makes Call of Duty the second best-selling franchise for console games.
- Grand Theft Auto is the only console-based franchise ahead of it, but its first game was released in 1997 – a full six years earlier than Call of Duty. COD is only a few million sales behind GTA despite having six years of no sales at all!
- FIFA is the franchise below Call of Duty and it’s only sold 325 million copies despite releasing a game every year and being out since 1993 – while also being the leading video game depiction of the world’s biggest sport.
Suddenly, the 5th place remark sounds a lot more remarkable. Another interesting caveat to consider; there have apparently been over 500 million downloads of Call of Duty: Mobile, the free-to-play COD game for mobile devices. Add that to the sales figures and this is comfortably the biggest franchise we’ve ever seen in gaming.
Call of Duty Has Been Played For Over 25 Billion Hours
It took me a while to get my head around this but Call of Duty players have played the game so much it’s led to a cumulative play time of over 25 billion hours.
That’s 2.85 million years…
Have you ever heard of something so remarkable? Keep in mind this franchise didn’t exist before 2003, so this just shows you how popular it is and how many people continue to play the games for hours, days, weeks, months and years on end! It also means people have played Call of Duty for longer than the course of human existence. Let that sink in for a moment.
In my view, you can’t be a proper Xbox fan without appreciating Call of Duty. It was never a console-exclusive game, but it laid the foundations for Xbox to develop into the amazing platform it is today. Who knows, without the success of the COD franchise during the early 2000s and 2010s, maybe the Xbox 360 wouldn’t have won the war against the PS3 and maybe we’d never have seen more Xbox consoles again!