Warfield series game director Vince Zampella once said that Activision's best-selling Call of Duty series exists solely because "EA was such a jerk back then."Zampella's words are quite explosive, but also candid. Of course, he is now back under EA.
Over the course of his career, Zampella has bounced between rivals EA and Activision, first working on EA's Medal of Honor series, then founding Infinity Ward (IW) to help build Call of Duty - specifically, to make it a Medal of Honor killer - before returning to EA after helping develop Titanfall and Apex Legends at Respawn.
Looking back on his career, Zampella told GQ: "Call of Duty exists because EA is such a jerk."
Zampella initially participated in the development of the "Medal of Honor" series at EA from 1999 to 2002, and served as the lead designer of the highly acclaimed "Medal of Honor: Combined Assault".Since then, he co-founded Infinity Ward with the team. It was originally planned to continue to cooperate with EA to develop "Medal of Honor", but EA decided to take the series back to internal development.
Former Infinity Ward artist Justin Thomas said this in an interview with MCV as early as 2013: "For legal reasons, I can only say that things did not go as planned. We had completed multiple development milestones at that time, but did not get the money, and the work was in financial difficulties."
It was then that Activision responded to Infinity Ward's final call for help.Activision was interested in the team that created Medal of Honor: Allied Assault, and was attracted by the idea of creating a new series that could beat EA's own games.
We all know what happened next - "Call of Duty" quickly became a phenomenal super IP.Although Activision and Zampella fell out after the release of Call of Duty 6: Modern Warfare 2 in 2009, and a protracted legal battle broke out involving unpaid bonuses and royalties, Zampella eventually won a substantial settlement.
This dispute also led him to found Respawn, which later created "Titanfall" and "Apex Legends", and EA first cooperated with it and eventually acquired it.Since then, Zampella has been promoted within EA, taking over more game projects, and eventually became the person in charge of the "Battlefield" series that had fallen into a trough, and successfully led the team to launch "Battlefield 6", which gained a reputation this month.
The "GQ" interview also mentioned an interesting episode: There were plans for "Alien" director Ridley Scott to direct a "Call of Duty" movie, but it ultimately fell through.
"One time Ridley Scott came over - he's my idol - but he wasn't familiar with the game, and he would ask questions like, 'How do you organize what happens to the player?' There was talk of having him do a Call of Duty movie, but we never really considered it seriously. After all, game-based movies at that time were almost not very good."
