At one point, a Call of Duty game centered exclusively around zombies was in development. The Call of Duty franchise is one of the most diverse franchises in gaming, despite what you may think. It has gone through numerous time periods allowing for different subgenres including sci-fi. The series also has a ton of different modes from the typical multiplayer, blockbuster campaigns, battle royale modes, and perhaps its most unique attraction, zombies. The mode was introduced in Call of Duty: World at War and quickly became a staple of the franchise, so much so that it seems Activision had every intention of spinning it off into its own property. Call of Duty has kept zombies as its third mode for years and used to generate extra money from it by selling more zombies content in the DLC packs, but fans have longed for a standalone game.
According to a former Raven Software employee on LinkedIn, Raven Software was working on a Call of Duty zombies game between 2011 and 2012. The project was described as an ambitious live service project revolving around the undead side of the Call of Duty universe. Unfortunately, Activision had the project canceled after the studio that owned zombies raised issue with the project. It’s believed this studio is Treyarch since they created zombies and were the only team making zombie content until Advanced Warfare in 2014. It’s a bit surprising to see that there was a live service Call of Duty game being planned that far out before that genre had really taken off. It’s unclear what the zombies game would’ve looked like and how it may have differed from the content we get already.
Treyarch still has a heavy hand in zombies to date as it worked on the zombies modes in Call of Duty: Vanguard and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3. Whether we ever get a standalone zombies game remains to be seen, but maybe that could change under Microsoft. If other studios within the Microsoft ecosystem want to take a crack at Call of Duty, we could get more experimental titles, but that remains to be seen.
