Treyarch’s next installment in the Call of Duty franchise is a return to familiar territory. Earlier today, the developer released the first teaser trailer for Call of Duty: Black Ops: Cold War.
The teaser, first discovered by CharlieIntel, is made up entirely of newsreels and historical footage, likely providing a background for the game’s plot. The trailer itself is heavy on the Cold War intrigue, and introduces players to a Soviet spy codenamed Perseus. According to the teaser — and some light Googling — Perseus was never caught, and infiltrated deeply into some of the most secretive U.S. defense institutions in order to give the USSR an edge in the global arms race.
The trailer centers around an actual television interview with KGB defector Yuri Bezmenov, who describes the slow and careful ways that the Soviet Union was working to undermine the United States. Bezmenov, a former Soviet journalist who became a prominent anti-communist author and speaker in the west after his defection, explains that the Soviet Union had a careful, decades-long plan to infiltrate and destabilize America.
“It’s a slow process which we called active measures,” says Bezmenov. He explains that there are four stages to this plan which will eventually lead to Normalization, which he describes as “what will happen in the United States if you allow all the schmucks to put a Big Brother government in Washington D.C. who will promise loads of things, no matter whether the promises were fulfilled or not.” Finally he ends with a strong warning, “the time bomb is ticking. With every second the disaster is coming closer and closer. The danger is real.”
While he explains all of this, the teaser show flashes of everything from the Vietnam War, civil rights protests, government meetings, and speeches given by Ronald Reagan.
The teaser’s release was timed with members of the Call of Duty community completing a multi-day ARG that involved various forms of Cold War-style code breaking, which led them to secret rooms inside the Verdansk map in Call of Duty: Warzone — which seems to imply there could be a connection between Black Ops: Cold War and Warzone. The ARG also included a variety of video tapes, each corresponding to a year in Cold War history, with similar clips to the ones in this teaser.
The new Call of Duty is the latest in Treyarch’s Black Ops series, but since the latest iteration was set in the year 2043, it’s not exactly clear how this game fits into the timeline. Since this game appears to be set in the Cold War, it’s pretty likely it won’t take place in the future. But we don’t know if this is an alternate Cold War that will lead up to the events of the rest of the series, or if it’s some kind of hard reset on the Black Ops storyline.
The trailer ends with the reveal of the Call of Duty: Black Ops: Cold War title, and the news that it will be revealed in full on Aug. 26.
