In the wake of hundreds of members of staff from Activision being made redundent after the Microsoft merger, old footage has emerged online of an axed Call of Duty game called "Future Warfare" (disgruntled ex-employees strike again). It would have been the first jetpack game, but we got CoD Ghosts instead...
The jetpack era produced some of the most divisive games in franchise history, and by the release of Infinite Warfare, it was clearly an experiment that Activision had to abandon. But they were undoubtedly great in certain aspects, and we can now look back fondly at the things these games did really well.
The same cannot be said for Ghosts, which, apart from having godlike SnD, was a terrible CoD. But according to footage that emerged online recently, Ghosts was just a fill-in game after the original idea was axed. Apparently the original idea was for a game called Future Warfare, that would have been effectively the first jetpacks game.
Footage Of First Jetpack Game Emerges Online
The first jetpacks game developed for CoD was not AW, it was a project called Future Warfare. And after ten years, footage from the game has finally emerged online. It's incredible that none of this has been revealed before, but the culture of leaking wasn't as developed ten years ago (nowadays we can already give you an overview of Black Ops Gulf War before it's even been announced).
We received a two-minute clip you can watch below, which was taken from one of the missions, Moonbase Assault:
Fuck it, NX1. pic.twitter.com/KDPh6pwHxn
— Josh H. (@mangafigurines) January 27, 2024
In terms of how futuristic the game looks, this even gives Infinite Warfare a run for its money.
We also got to see a brief look at the multiplayer:
fuck it, NX1 multiplayer. https://t.co/wGRQlQjSMl pic.twitter.com/OSjycBusDl
— Internet Crush (@catgurlfriend) January 28, 2024
This game was being developed by Neversoft, one of Activision's support studios that was merged into Infinity Ward on May 3, 2014. Perhaps the higher-ups didn't have enough faith in Neversoft and their futuristic plans for CoD, or perhaps they received negative feedback from testers. The details surrounding the project remain a mystery.
As a CoD fan who distinctly remembers being disappointed by Ghosts, I'm devastated that we didn't get this game instead. But then, if it had been unpopular and the jetpacks experiment was tried and killed in 2013, we would never have received Black Ops 3. So maybe we have to be thankful for the way history actually played out.