Call of Duty has a long history of ripping reels of film from the cinema and feeding them straight into the computer. The early games of the series don’t so much reference war movies as reshoot them with a POV camera. Saving Private Ryan’s Normandy beach landing is present and correct in Call of Duty 2—down to the vomiting comrades—while scenes from Enemy at the Gates have been clearly identifiable in not one but two campaigns to date.
For Black Ops – Cold War, it seems Raven Software has turned its attention to the domestic battlefield: the tussle for relevance between Sheriff Woody and Buzz Lightyear. Toy Story fans will remember that the film climaxes with a high speed chase, as Woody and Buzz pilot a sentient RC car in a desperate bid to catch up with a moving truck. Sparks fly from the truck’s rear ramp as little RC narrowly avoids a crushing beneath the wheels of the road’s traffic.
Now that’s fresh in your head, take a look at the closing moments of Cold War’s first mission, in which Adler’s team catches up with two targets linked to the Iran hostage crisis. Minor spoilers, obvs:
Ask a developer and they might say the resemblance is coincidental. All I know is that Black Ops teaches you to draw your own conclusions. There have certainly been some strange cameos in COD.
