


defector, and G. Edward Griffin, the American conspiracy theorist and longtime member of the John Birch Society. The announcement trailer for Cold War is built around footage from a television interview, in 1984, between Yuri Bezmenov, the K.G.B. and Trump are spiritual siblings, defined in large part by the extent of their impunity and their ability to foment fear and paranoia.

One minute, you’re tossing an unarmed Iranian man off a rooftop, in a revenge mission against the Shah the next, you’re liquidating a whole village en route to securing a nuke that the Pentagon had squirrelled away, just in case it wanted to flatten South Vietnam.ĭespite four years of mutual antipathy, the C.I.A. The player is cast as an unaccountable gunslinger.
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It is Reagan himself, reanimated with an uncanny eeriness that evokes Resident Evil, who lays out your mission: protect the free world from Communist infiltration through, more or less, state-sanctioned extralegal murder. The game’s jet-setting trail of blood starts with Iranian operatives who are believed to have participated in the Iran hostage crisis and leads to a Soviet agent, known as Perseus, who, we’re told, infiltrated the American security state decades ago and is now plundering its nuclear secrets, in a final plot to humiliate the decadent West. Those who think it’s a blast and those who think it’s an abomination will likely cite the same evidence for their beliefs. But, depending on who is playing it, the game exists in one of two distinct, ideologically opposite dimensions. It’s too generous to credit Cold War as a work of knowing interactive satire hiring former Navy SEALs and Oliver North as consultants over the years would have required Andy Kaufman levels of commitment.
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(According to its publisher, Activision Blizzard, Call of Duty has outearned the entire canon of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.) Activision Blizzard has always insisted that the games are apolitical, a claim that is absurd on its face with Cold War’s ode to the Reagan-era death squad, however, the franchise has now pushed so deeply into the territory of right-wing fantasy that it reaches a point of inadvertent parody, as if you could squint hard enough at a Steven Seagal movie that it could start looking like a Paul Verhoeven movie-a skewering of American empire rather than a paean. headache, but Cold War is the seventeenth entry in the main Call of Duty series, which maintains massive bipartisan appeal, despite-maybe even, in part, because of-its reactionary nature. in the midst of an ongoing anti-democratic power grab.Ī lesser franchise might see this as a P.R. In Cold War, Ronald Reagan’s Central Intelligence Agency operatives are the under-heralded heroes of the early nineteen-eighties-by an accident of timing, the game celebrates coup enthusiasts in the C.I.A. On November 13th, a day when President Donald Trump declared electoral victory in Pennsylvania and Georgia, almost accidentally conceded the election, and then threatened to withhold a coronavirus vaccine from residents of New York State, the marketplace welcomed Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War, a video game that glorifies the schemes of an image-obsessed, cognitively dubious President with an ambivalent relationship to both work and the rule of law.
