It’s official—as speculated, Activision has confirmed that 2024’s sausage from the Call of Duty factory will be Black Ops 6. First revealed in a wraparound advertisement in today’s USA Today, and thus weirdly marketed to old people staying in hotels, the marketing campaign has begun its inexorable expansion with a teaser website and posters declaring the game’s name.
If you’re immediately confused by the lack of a CODBlops 5, that was 2020’s most recent edition in the series, Black Ops Cold War. That game—which was a direct sequel to 2010’s original Black Ops—ended with (spoiler!) a choice over whether to tell the truth or lie about the location of Soviet spy Perseus. The marketing for Blops 6 (Editor’s note: I think we should call it what it is, Call of Duty 27 — David) seems centred around this moment, with a website called The Truth Lies appearing this week.
This leaves the setting for the new game somewhat less ambiguous. Cold War was set in the 1980s, and rumours swirled at the end of last year that accurately predicted a Treyarch-developed Black Ops sequel and suggested it would be set during the Gulf War. No, not that one, the one President Bush started. No, the first President Bush. Gulf War 1.
That makes a lot of chronological sense, as it’s the next big U.S.-involved conflict in which our intrepid team of shark-jumping, MKUltra-addled heroes could meddle within.
The mysterious The Truth Lies website sees Mount Rushmore’s stone presidents wearing giant blindfolds, bearing the same legend—the same image that appears in the mock newspaper story wrapped around USA Today today, and on the back page of The New York Post. The site loops a short video of some people fussing about on a road, getting into a car, and then seemingly climbing up Mount Rushmore to place the blindfolds, before admiring their work.
You can change TV channels on the site to see other equally badly shot short films, of people putting up The Truth Lies posters, a bunch of static fuzz, and then images of worldwide monuments similarly defaced. People on Reddit are also posting images they claim to be Black Ops 6 posters pasted up in New York.
There you have it. You’re now expected to enthusiastically speculate about what it could all mean! I suggest just entirely dismissing the entire thing from your mind, until Activision inevitably offers something more coherent during the Xbox Games Showcase on June 9.
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