Hey —

There's a specific window in Call of Duty history that I don't think people talk about enough. 2012. The gap between Modern Warfare 3's fatigue and whatever came next. The franchise was the biggest thing in entertainment, but it was also starting to feel... predictable. You knew what you were getting. A short campaign, a multiplayer grind, some zombies. Fun, but safe.

Then Black Ops 2 dropped.

And it was not safe.

The video I just put out is about that. About a game that decided to leap forward instead of standing still. It's about fifteen minutes long. I talk about the branching campaign, the Pick 10 system, the Zombies mode that refused to be a side attraction, and why the Strike Force missions were a beautiful failure.

But – as always – there's stuff that didn't fit. So here's the newsletter version.

The thing I cut that I wish I hadn't

I had a whole section about the game's opening weekend. It sold over $500 million in 24 hours. That number is absurd now, but at the time it was world-record-breaking. And what struck me wasn't the money – it was the energy. Midnight launches were still a thing. People waited in line outside GameStop at 11pm on a Tuesday. There was a physical, communal excitement that digital pre-loading has completely erased.

I cut it because I couldn't find a way to describe that feeling without sounding like an old man yelling at a cloud. But I remember it. And I think part of why Black Ops 2 still has a dedicated player base in 2026 – over 11,000 people on Xbox 360 servers alone, last I checked – is because of that shared memory. You didn't just play this game. You were there for it.

The Pick 10 thing I didn't fully explain

In the video, I mention the Pick 10 system as one of the biggest innovations in Call of Duty multiplayer history. But I didn't get into why it worked.

Here's the thing: before Black Ops 2, creating a class was a list of boxes you filled. Primary weapon. Secondary weapon. Perk 1. Perk 2. Perk 3. Equipment. It was functional, but it was also rigid. You had to take a secondary weapon even if you never used it. You had to fill every perk slot.

Pick 10 gave you ten points and said: spend them however you want. Want to run only a primary with six attachments and no perks, no grenades, no secondary? You could. Want to skip your primary entirely and stack five perks and a knife? You could. A developer named Vonderhaar – David Vonderhaar, the face of Treyarch's multiplayer design – was the one who pushed for this. He said in interviews that he wanted players to be able to make bad classes as well as good ones. The system wasn't about balance. It was about expression.

And that's why it stuck. It wasn't just a mechanical tweak. It was a philosophical shift. The game trusted you to know what you wanted.

I cut that because it was getting into the weeds. But it's been in my head ever since.

The Strike Force missions – I was too hard on them

In the script, I basically dismissed the Strike Force missions as a failed experiment. And they were, in some ways – clunky controls, AI that couldn't follow orders, a difficulty spike that felt unfair. But I didn't give them enough credit for trying.

Treyarch could have made another linear campaign. They had the budget. They had the audience. Nobody was asking for optional RTS-style missions where you control drones and direct squads in a first-person shooter. But they built them anyway. And the fact that your performance in those missions affected whether China and the US became allies in the ending – that was ambitious. That was weird.

The game had five different endings, depending on choices you made across the campaign. In 2012, in a Call of Duty game, that was genuinely radical. The industry mostly ignored it. Call of Duty was supposed to be a theme park, not a branching novel. But Treyarch tried anyway.

The missions didn't work. But the attempt mattered. And I should have said that.

What I'm still thinking about

The Zombies mode. I could do a whole separate video on Black Ops 2 Zombies alone. TranZit was a mess – the fog, the Denizens, the bus that left without you – but it was also the most ambitious map they'd ever made. An open world, in Zombies, in 2012. It didn't work, but again: they tried.

And Grief mode – 8 players, two teams, competing to survive – was so far ahead of its time that nobody really appreciated it until years later. The chaos of trying to trap the other team with zombies while also staying alive yourself – that was genuinely innovative. It never came back.

I think about that a lot. The things that didn't return. The ideas that were too weird for the franchise to keep.

Where Black Ops 2 stands now

As of 2026, there are still active Discord communities running matches. Plutonium – the PC mod launcher – keeps the game alive with dedicated servers and custom content. Over 11,000 people were playing on Xbox 360 servers last year, and that's just the official numbers. The game refuses to die.

And I think that's because it was the last Call of Duty that felt like it was made by people who loved Call of Duty. Not executives chasing trends. Not designers responding to data. Just a studio that said: what if we put branching stories in a military shooter? What if we let players break the rules of their own loadouts? What if we made a Zombies map on a farm with a bus that drives in circles?

It was messy. It was uneven. It was, in a lot of ways, a beautiful failure.

But it was never boring.

And that's more than most games can say.

What's next

Next video is already in the works – I'm digging into another nostalgic one that I haven't talked about yet. If you have a game you want me to cover, hit reply. I genuinely read these.

Thanks for being here. Means more than you know.

– Respwnz

P.S. The Black Ops 2 video is here if you haven't seen it: Video