While the last game we looked at In Hindsight, Gears of War, has been out for quite a while, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare is, well, more modern, having been released a full year later and still being relatively current. Not only was it almost universally lauded by critics, but its impact both on the industry and the community has been disproportionately profound, considering its short presence in the marktplace thus far. Call of Duty 4 sold remarkably well on all three platforms (don’t talk to me about the Nintendo DS version; you know that doesn’t count) and constantly trades places back and forth with Halo 3 as Xbox Live’s most played multiplayer game, but what can account for such phenomenal success?

Obviously, Call of Duty is a big-budget, high-profile series, but while the previous titles also sold quite well, none of them seemed to dominate the public consciousness. What was different about this game? Perhaps with many fans’ disappointment with the Treyarch-developed Call of Duty 3, anticipation and hope for a title stoked anticipation for a sequel that many hoped would be a return to form. Unfortunately, while I do think that result was at least equal to what the fans hoped for, it seems like some pretty counterintuitive reasoning, the parallel of Soul Calibur 4’s similar hype progression notwithstanding. After all, it doesn’t seem to make sense that a low point in a series would increase its popularity, especially nine months after the new title’s release.

Clearly, brand recognition is not the primary sales motivation. Call of Duty 4 was, after all, the first title released exclusively on current generation platforms, and it shows it, providing plenty of the usual next-gen shine. All the typical bullet-list residents are present: a proprietary engine with plenty of great particle, lighting, and depth-of-field effects, and so on. Honestly, the graphical effects themselves are largely unobtrusive, since they’re never over the top and always so appropriate to the believable aesthetic style of the Call of Duty, which, in motion, tends to look like footage from a war correspondent. Such imagery is essential to the delivery Infinity Ward’s narrative set pieces which deliver the game’s global storyline, and the player’s interaction with that story is, as usual for the Call of Duty series, likewise well-wrought, with an intuitive, visceral shooting mechanic and tight pacing that constantly keep the player charging knee-deep through an ever-changing conflict.

However, once again, the Call of Duty games have always featured well-constructed theatrical narratives with great controls and graphics, which does not differentiate the fourth in the series from the rest of the bunch. Simply enough, it seems that the sheer fact that the game takes place in a very believable modern setting evokes a whole new experience from largely the same audience, using largely the same formula. It continues the Infinity Ward tradition of presenting two converging storylines, consisting of an American portion and a much more interesting foreign portion, just like previous titles. However, instead of taking place in the Second World War, the conflict now hops back and forth between rural Russia, reeling from internal violence, and a generic Arabian setting that is just vague enough to be universally familiar and just detailed enough to be perfectly evocative. Honestly, for most people who aren’t in the VFW, World War 2 might as well be Star Wars for all its familiarity: they know plenty about it, but it seems distant and surreal. Suddenly, though, the videogame looks more and more like the evening news, and it takes on a sort immediacy that is both enthralling and, considering much of the subject matter, absolutely terrifying. Few, if any, games on the market then or since have delivered that same sense of of believability that immerses the gamer so totally in the experience.