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When Unprofessional Blog Posts Attack: Call of Duty Edition

Infinity Ward rep pushes right on D pad, calls in a blog strike on Activision internal producer.

In case you're wondering...
In case you're wondering...
One thing I've found over my time covering the game industry is that there are a lot of common conflicts that take place between the development side and the business side of a game's creation. There also seems to be a lot of anti-internal-producer venom out at some external development houses. Get into enough unguarded, regular-guys-just-talking conversations with a guy who's working at a developer and I'd say you'll encounter some variant of this static more regularly than you might think.

The latest example comes out of Infinity Ward's Robert "fourzerotwo" Bowling, the studio's Director of Communications and Community Manager. He's definitely become one of the more prominent faces for IW. And yesterday he made one thing perfectly clear: he is not a fan of the way Infinity Ward's last game is being name-dropped to promote the next Call of Duty game, World at War.

Noah Heller - Stop Doing Interviews...

Seriously man…. You’re killing me!

If I see one more Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare google alert come through my inbox, that ends up being a COD:WaW article that is only showing up because YOU referenced Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare more times than you mention World At War….

Especially when you’re pulling shit out of your ass. Come on man, interview about your game. Not OURS! Call of Duty: World at War can stand on it’s own merits, leave ours out of it. Like this gem of a quote from today’s article on CVG…

“In the previous Call of Dutys it might take three or four shots from a bolt action rifle,” he explained. “We made sure that a single shot centre mass would kill that opponent because that’s the expectation of the player.”

WTF are you talking about?! “in previous Call of Dutys blah blah blah”. First of all, you didn’t work on “previous Call of Dutys”, so don’t talk as if you’re down with how / why things were designed the way they were. Second, you’re completely fucking wrong.

Bolt Action rifles are one hit kills in every Call of Duty we (Infinity Ward) made!!

I won’t compare it to World at War’s Bolt Actions, I can’t speak to that because I don’t work there. Just like you don’t work here, so please stop talking about our games.

A rule of thumb I like to use is…. when promoting your game. Promote YOUR game. Don’t compare it to another game, or reference what OTHER games did in the past, pitch YOUR game. I mean, you have lots of cool things you could talk about… like Nazi Zombies….

Can you guys please stop interviewing this guy, talk to someone who actually works on the Dev Team at Treyarch and knows what the fuck they’re talking about. Not Senior Super Douche Noah Heller from Activision - who apparently has never played the game and doesn’t even work at the developer.

Alright, I’m done ranting… but I can’t take another google alert of garbage coming through my inbox with bullshit quotes from this guy.


Heller is a Senior Producer at Activision who manages the Call of Duty series. He has been with the company since March of 2007.

You know, I think Robert's blog sort of speaks for itself, and I'm not really interested in "taking sides" or whatever, so I don't have a whole lot to add other than wondering how badly Infinity Ward wishes it could get one of those Bungie-style independence deals and get away from Activision's sinister-sounding annual release schedule. I'll just say that I suspect this has to do with more than just bolt action rifles. But hey, maybe I'm just reading way too much into all this.

I'd try to start a betting pool to see how long you all thought it would be before the original blog post gets removed, but at this point, it's been up so long that it might as well just stay up.

Hey, cheer up, everybody! Call of Duty: World at War ships next week! We'll have a review on Tuesday!!!!!! Video games!!!!!!!!
Jeff Gerstmann on Google+