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Infinity Ward Talks About Call Of Duty’s Unprecedented Rise

One day, you produce a relatively popular series that falls a little shy of competing with the biggest of the big. And then the next day, you are the biggest of the big. You redefine biggest of the big.

And you know, that isn't the easiest transition to make. Infinity Ward's Mark Rubin has been with the studio since Call of Duty 2 , and has watched the franchise become the record-breaking phenomenon it is now. In a recent Guardian interview , Rubin spoke about this huge uprising, and the fact that CoD4 (the title that undoubtedly began the worldwide domination) benefited from gaming becoming more mainstream:

"When Call of Duty 2 came out it was a really successful game, but its success was in the vicinity of other games. But then CoD 4 was released and it was so huge. I think what happened was, it arrived at that point at which gaming became a more culturally acceptable thing. We had celebrities going on chat shows, talking about how much they played; suddenly everyone was talking about games. It started this snowball. It socialised gaming, suddenly it wasn't just the thing that guys do in their mum and dad's basement!"

He went on to say that after Modern Warfare 2 erupted, entertainment records were shattered. And although it may sound a little weird, the more popular CoD became, the more stress the developers felt to live up to expectations. "We're not reaping the benefits from it as much as some people think we are," Rubin said. Yeah, well, we're fairly certain Activision is "reaping the benefits."

Also, he spoke about how Infinity Ward's focus for CoD has always been "fun," and not necessarily blowing everyone away with immensely fine-tuned graphics. Said Rubin:

"Our philosophy in game design is all about fun. We don't make tech demos, we don't look for the latest buzzword graphics elements, like… I don't know… fullscreen ambient occlusion. We're not like, we have to put that on the box – we don't think that way. There are games I play that are graphically beautiful and that's why I play them, but there are games like ours that are just fun. That's what we concentrate on. Everything is geared around making the game more fun."

That's the sort of philosophy we appreciate, and we fully expect a fun game to arrive on November 8. Don't you?