Back in the day in 2002, Medal of Honor: Allied Assault launched. With its grander scale than anything that came before it and use of dramatic scripted setpieces, it planted the seeds for what would become the pulp-cinematic modern military shooter. Then in the following year of 2003, Call of Duty, developed by much of the same people who worked on Allied Assault, launched. Call of Duty refined and expanded what Allied Assault did, most notably heavily incorporating the use of AI squad members into your team, which further added to the immersion that you were fighting in a war. These iterative improvements would come to a head with the release of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. The game became acclaimed for its further refinement of the cinematic formula that the games pioneered plus utilizing a contemporary, modern-day story, which gave the game feel that it was a summer blockbuster movie. With this game’s release, the recipe of the pulp-cinematic modern military shooter was complete. However, flash forward into 2012 and the subgenre was (outside of Call of Duty) moribund. So what killed the pulp-cinematic modern military shooter?

• Following the smash success of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare), a glut of imitators followed, many of which were derivative to a tee and offered little to the table. The oversaturation would reach a breaking point with…

• The high-profile failure of Homefront. Homefront was an ambitious brand-new IP that was billed as being a Call of Duty competitor (and had a similar level of advertising going for it). However, the game had garnered notoriety for its subject matter and that negative word-of-mouth turned away prospective players from buying it, and the people that did buy it saw a mediocre title that was half-baked (with a campaign mode that can be beat in less than three hours even on the highest difficulty) and pretty much served to remind audiences how good Call of Duty and Battlefield were (whatever Homefront did, those two games did significantly better). These factors led to its ultimately poor performance. The game’s combined notoriety and poor performance ended up souring mainstream gamers’ tasted towards towards these kinds of games. In retrospect, Homefront embodied the worst stereotypes of this subgenre.

• As the 2010s dawned, gamers’ tastes began changing. As more and more people became aware of what actually happened during the war on terror (most notably the Iraq War), a backlash began forming. Gamers began seeing these games as jingoistic (the oversaturation combined with the failure of the above-mentioned Homefront only added fuel to the funeral pyre), and there was increased scrutiny towards the unfortunate implications often present in these games. All of this backlash would come to a head with…

• Spec Ops: The Line. While the game wasn’t commercially successful (in fact, Yager and 2K expected that it would flop at retail, and they were somewhat right), it garnered acclaim precisely for its merciless deconstruction of the kinds of games that Call of Duty 4+ pioneered. Much like how grunge (principally Nirvana) became the face of the unified backlash against hair metal and the decade of excess of the 80s that it embodied, Spec Ops: The Line became the face of the unified backlash against the pulp-cinematic modern military shooter and the decade of jingoism of the 00s that it embodied. The acclaim Spec Ops: The Line got effectively heralded the death of the pulp-cinematic modern military shooter.

Today, only Call of Duty survives (and thrives), largely due to grandfather clause courtesy of it inventing and codifying the tropes associated with the subgenre, with most attempts outside of the series since 2012 being doomed to failure (as they’ll be accused of attempting to ride the franchise’s coattails and be labeled the derisive “Call of Duty clone” and treated rather accordingly). Unlike other bygone FPS subgenres such as the 90s-era “boomer shooters” embodied by games like Doom, Duke Nukem 3D and Quake that saw a rebirth (albeit in single-player as multiplayer types are still dead though the latter has evolved into “hero shooters”) or immersive sims (they always had a hard life in commercial performance) embodied by games like System Shock and Deus Ex finding a new audience in indie and small-time developers seeking to innovate and expand beyond the Origin-Looking Glass-Ion Storm-Arkane cluster, we haven’t seen anyone else outside of the Call of Duty studios try to make a pulp-cinematic modern military shooter of their own, because they know that outside of the series, the subgenre is dead in the water with little hope of recovery, and it’s gonna get mocked by gamers and critics alike.