We almost got a third-person horror Call of Duty set in Vietnam with 'stuff you've never seen before', but instead we just got more Modern Warfare
As of 2023, Sledgehammer Games has worked on not one but two versions of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, but I would have been much more interested to play the studio's original pitch to Activision: a third-person CoD in a "scary version of Vietnam".
I'd heard about Sledgehammer's cancelled project before, but co-founder Glen Schofield, who left the studio in 2018, makes it sound a lot more tantalising than I'd realised.
"We wanted to make a scary version of Vietnam," Schofield tells us. "And not just scary, we wanted intense battles that were personal, but stuff you've never seen before. We were making it, and we were really psyched about having you go through tunnels, and everything is scary because there's not much light down there. Sometimes you're shooting in the dark."
Prior to co-founding Sledgehammer, Schofield worked at EA Redwood Shores, which would become Visceral Games, and created Dead Space, so he knows his horror. But Call of Duty: Fog of War would have been a very different kind of horror, maintaining the action-packed set pieces the series is known for.
"There's another sequence where you get to a river," Schofield says, "and you just decide you have to follow the river down. I think you're trying to get away. And we turned the camera, so now you're running towards it, right? And the camera’s moving with you. But what we do is, in the background of the jungle, we see this giant American bomber, the B-52, on fire.
"[The character] looks behind him and sees it’s coming down. And it looks like it's coming down close, but you see it dip down behind the trees. It's disappeared, and you're waiting for the explosion. It doesn't happen. And now it is coming towards you. Then you jump, and we turn the camera off this cliff, into the waterfall and the water below. You’re looking up now, so you're diving backwards, and you see the plane go over your head, dropping pieces into the water, and then crash. It was good."
Unfortunately, it wasn't meant to be. Trouble at Infinity Ward—co-founders Vince Zampella and Jason West left amid a legal dispute, taking some of the team with them—saw Activision scrambling to rescue Modern Warfare 3. The result: Sledgehammer was told to drop Fog of War and jump onto the other game. The studio never got to return.